WOMAN IN ART
portrayed their deities for the delight of their eyes, augmenting their own kingship—the head—by symbols of power they worshipped in animal forms.
In this twentieth century A.D. we realize the value of that prehistoric portraiture, some of which Dr. Flinders Petrie exhumed from millenniums of debris, and presented to our age the ivory carved features of Mena, King of the first Egyptian dynasty about 5000 B.C. Wall paintings in Egypt give representations of the "four races of the world," and that was done more than three thousand years ago.
In a previous chapter you have noticed other ancient and Ptolymaic portraits in stone. Greek painting, which would have enriched our knowledge and art, was ruthlessly destroyed by the Roman conquerors in large measure, although fragments survived to assure us moderns that their art reached a high degree of refinement in features and in the art of portraiture.
We know that all religion is the spirit life of the human in its struggle to find his relation to the Author of Life, Truth, Righteousness and Love. These attributes were lived and proved to the world for all time by the God-Man who stooped from the heights to the lowliness of earth to verify and justify the ways of God to man.
Portraiture was not a large factor in renaissance art, not even in the fifteenth century. A few of popes, doges, and dukes were painted, but few were painted of women. Leonardo da Vinci painted his own portrait which has been the admiration of centuries of painters. The portrait of Mona Lisa, wife of his friend, has had both condemnation and praise, and endless speculation as to the character portrayed—is it purity and goodness, or sarcastic and hypocritical? For a period of four years the artist worked it over, so evidently it did not suit himself as a portrait.
As we have said, there were long stretches in years when woman filled her space in the economy of life with little or no notice taken of her value outside or inside the home, unless she were on the throne or within its radius.
Modern history beginning with the Norman Conquest is more than a thousand years old. That long period brings us to an epoch of history enacted in England some three hundred years before the dawn of the renaissance in Italy.
History in the past has been concerned with kings, their wars and conquests. But when Clio dips her pen to write of queens, she records names, dates, marriages, the birth of future sovereigns, and the peaceful activities of the queen regent during the king's absence on war intent.
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