The prophet Ezekiel is desired " to take him a tile, and lay it before him, and portray upon it the city, even Jeru salem." Chap. iv. v. 1.—but a more remarkable passage in proof of the knowledge of painting among the Jews is that where Ananias is desired by his master, that if he could not prevail upon Jesus to accompany him, he should then bring back his picture drawn after the life. Ananias made the attempt to draw his likeness, but was prevented by a miracle from accomplishing it.
We mention the art of embroidery as demonstrating the knowledge of the Jews in painting ; for the acquaintance with that art cannot be altogether confined to the meaning modern practice gives to the word; it must admit of mo dification, according to the various ways by which the ta lent was exemplified. Painting comprehended all the modes of imitation, by means of colours and drawing, whether the matter used were paint, coloured wool, or silk, wood, or stone ; we talk of a mosaic picture, and cannot deny the same appellation to embroidery. This seems, moreover, to have been an exceedingly ancient mode of painting, and certainly the first practised in Greece, as we find mention of it many ages prior to the Trojan war. The history of Philomela, although wrapt up in fable, shows the practice of tapestry pictures at a very remote period ; and Homer represents Helen as embroidering the pictures of all the misfortunes and battles which her beauty had brought upon the Greeks and Trojans.
We proceed now to the Egyptians, whose practice of painting may be called the deformity of the art It ex isted among them doubtless at a very remote period There is little merit. however, to a nation, in being able to trace the antiquity of an art to a very great height, provided they cannot at the same time, show a progressive and ra pid improvement, in proportion to that advantage. The Egyptians, however, adhered with inveteracy to that pe culiar characteristic of eastern nations, the strict ob servance of habits and acquirements, unvaried and unim proved, from generation to generation ; and the aversion to change, which is so little congenial to the notions of the western world. Fashion, a word of such potency in our hemisphere, was to them unknown and unintelligible. They avoided, it is true, frivolities of fashion, but remain ed, at the same time, insensible to its stimulating in fluence ; and were content to drone through existence as their fathers had droned before them. The state of the art with them affords no indication of its age, no hint from whence to demonstrate the length of its endurance ; the pictures of the earliest age and of the latest seem the works of the same artist ; and a thousand years is but as a day : We must, however, allow these pictures the merit of a perfectly decided, and marked national character, im mediately distinguishable from the productions of any other country, consisting of that singular rigidity of form, and absence of all grace, of which the word Egyptian is the best expletive. It is true, that the Egyptian artist
had not the same advantages which nature afforded to sti mulate the genius of Greece, in the beauty and elegant bodily conformation of their countrymen ; for the Egyp tians were an ill-favoured people, and possessed no ele gance of costume to make up for the defects of nature. They were nearly of a copper colour, bandy legged, high shouldered, having the flat ungainly countenance of the Ethiopian without their freedom and flexibility of limb. The Coptish damsels were then, as they still are, far from attractive, lank, ungraceful in form, and most unbe comingly attired ; however, we must allow their artists the merit of representing them with characteristic ugliness, as we may fairly infer from the very strong resemblance which the portraits on their ancient monuments bear to the present generation. They seem, however, to have been a healthy people, if we may draw that inference from a circumstance that has been remarked of all the mum mies as yet opened, which is, that they exhibit a full and regular set of teeth, and in a perfectly sound and healthy state.
The monstrosity of their mythological belief, which de lighted in every unnatural combination of the brute and human species, must have had a powerful influence in di recting the peculiar character of the Egyptian taste in the arts; from its constituting among them as elsewhere, the usual subject of the painter's skill. Although the dif ference of style between the Indian and Egyptian taste and practice in these matters is abundantly distinct, yet sufficient traces of resemblance exist to countenance the probability of their having drawn the seeds of their know ledge in the arts, as of every other acquirement, from this fountain-head of ancient science : their mutual abhorrence of change,—the establishment of hereditary and immuta ble casts and trades, by which every chance of advance, and every spark of genius, was so effectually neutralized, —alai the same policy of excluding strangers from their country, still so pertinaciously adhered to by the Chinese, —these customs being not only common, but peculiar to both, render it probable that a close intercourse must, at an early period, have existed between the inhabitants of these distant regions.