of classical
influence in Europe before the Renaissance is another.

I will instance one prevailing habit of Egyptian art.[79] In the long
processional subjects, and in individual separate figures, it was
usual to draw the head in perfect profile, the body facing you, but
not completely--a sort of compromise with a three-quarter view of
it--and the feet following each other, on the same line as the
profile. This mode of representing the human figure was only effaced
gradually by the introduction of Greek art, and continued to be the
conventional and decorative method even in the latest days of Egyptian
art; and it is curious to observe, that in the Dark ages European
design fell into the same habit. We cannot imagine that this distorted
way of drawing the human figure could have any intentional meaning,
and therefore may simply believe that it had become a custom; and that
when art has so stiffened and consolidated itself by precedent and
long tradition, as in Egypt and in India, certain errors as well as
certain truths become, as it were, ingrained into it. Plato remarked
of Egyptian art, that "the pictures and statues they made ten thousand
years ago were in no particular better than those they make now."[80]

One day, however, the Greek broke away from the ancient bonds of
custom. The body was made to accompany the head, and the feet followed
suit. But the strange fact remains that for several thousand years men
walked in profile, all out of drawing. Evidently originality was not
in much estimation among the Egyptian patrons of art. Design seemed to
have restricted itself to effective adaptations in a few permitted
forms in architecture and painting, and the illumination of the
papyrus MSS.

Egyptian elasticity of design found some scope in its domestic
ornamentation, in jewellery and hangings, but especially in its
embroideries for dress. Here much ingenuity was shown, and the
patterns on walls and the ceilings of tombs give us the designs which
Semper considers as having been originally intended for textile
purposes. He strains to a point to which I can hardly follow him, the
theory that all decorations were originally textile (except such as
proceeded in China from the lattice-work motive); though I willingly
accept the idea that textile decoration was one of the first and most
active promoters of design.

It is not possible for us to trace systematically the different points
at which Egyptian and Asiatic art