An art of drawing

A trail-blazing exhibition at the Louvre in Paris focuses on ancient Egyptian drawing, writes David Tresilian

Now in its final days at the Louvre museum in Paris, but due to reopen at the Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire in Brussels in September, L’Art du contour, le dessin dans l’Egypte ancienne focuses on one of the foundations of art in ancient Egypt, the art of drawing.
Presented in a small temporary exhibition space in the Richelieu wing of the Louvre, the exhibition could almost be overlooked by visitors hurrying through to the museum’s main collections. However, the exhibition’s small size belies its importance, since this is apparently the first time that the subject has been dealt with in a dedicated exhibition, and it has benefitted from the kind of scholarly treatment that perhaps the Louvre almost alone of all international museums is still able to devote to it.

There is an impressive catalogue containing specially commissioned essays on various aspects of ancient Egyptian drawing by recognised specialists. These consider topics such as the formal and technical aspects of ancient Egyptian drawing, as well as the material conditions of its production, including the training, remuneration and professional status of ancient Egyptian artists. The aim has been to explore how western-trained art historians might make sense of ancient Egyptian drawing, the curator, Guillemette Andreu-Lanoe, says in her introduction to the catalogue, before going on to quote the opinion of Giorgio Vasari, the Italian Renaissance artist, for whom drawing was “the father of the arts of architecture, painting and sculpture.”