296 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. Faulty though these conventions seem to us, they did not disturb the Egyptian spectator. He was famihar with them by long usage, and his intellect easily re-established the true relation between the various parts of objects so strangely distorted. Even as art matured and as, in some respects, the skill of the Egyptian sculptor increased, he never felt himself impelled to abandon these primitive methods of interpretation. Graphic conventions are
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^■"*i;:fl;;!!;jiiil||ji;f;)'«l|ijfl|iji;:pi-;n'i. Fig. 247.— The Queen waiting on Amenophis IV. : Tell-el-Amarna. From Prisse. like those belonging to written and spoken language ; when once established, even those which seem most absurd to the stranger are rendered acceptable by habit, and the native does not even suspect the existence of anomalies which bewilder the foreign visitor. Speaking generally, we may say that there is no perspective in Egyptian paintings and reliefs. And yet we find sincere efforts to render things in a less arbitrary fashion in certain works dating
