Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/143

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The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts.
59

the days of the ancient empire, to endow the statues of their kings with so much purity and nobility of form, were not disgusted by the strangeness of such combinations, by their extreme grotesqueness, and by the disagreeable results which they sometimes produced. A certain beauty may be found in such creations as the


Fig. 39.—Sekhet. Louvre. (Granite. Height 0·50 metres.)

Sphinx, and a few others, in which the human face is allied to the wings of a bird, and the trunk and posterior members of the most graceful and powerful of quadrupeds. But could any notion be more unhappy than that of crowning the bust of a man