The thing about prostitution...

That is the premise of this (very lousy) term paper I am writing, that Ancient Egyptian artists were the whores of religion. Well, aren't (really successful) artists always whores of one kind or another? Find a niche and fill it? If we're talking about Thomas Kinkaid, well, yeah. I've seen his art before he began his current oeuvre of kitsch, and it was fine. Not unusually fine, of course, just fine. The stuff he churns out is spun sugar, and the common folk eat it up. Well, taste is not an inborn trait in most of the race, for sure. My folks love him. Me, I like the vibrancy of a Cezanne, or the edginess of a Matisse. Not a Picasso fan, but I do admire his elan. He was a maverick for his time, and fortunate to have made a fine living on his creative vision. Most artists cannot do that, even today. Anyhoo, back to the Egyptians. The art of these mostly anonymous craftsmen prevailed in their society for 3,000 years. That's because their society prevailed, sometimes in disunity and disarray, but it did prevail. And most likely, that was because of its firm structure, God and Pharoah-God at the top, everyone else below. Their religion came out of their dependence on the Nile for all things. After all, just a few miles in any direction was burning desert, not very hospitable. And, too much water was just as bad for them. So they had an elaborate pantheon of gods to handle all that fear for them, and to assure that, after a life filled with the immenance of danger from every direction (and there were lions, too), they could walk forth into a paradise, and still visit their relatives they left behind. And that's where the artists came in, decorating their tombs with their good deeds in life, predicting a successful weighing in of their heart against an ostrich feather, providing them with lots of servants to tend to them, and make them a ka statue to inhabit on their personal altar. Ah, the good (after)life, Egyptian style. And all this had to be done in the strict code of rules. No willy-nilly creating allowed! There was a canon of proportions in which to portray the human body, eighteen fists high, face, legs and feet in profile, torso and eye frontal, otherwise known as twisted perspective. The more important you were, the bigger you were (hieratic scale). And this was not a portrait, oh nonono. You were portrayed perfect, youthful, free of defect or disease, the ideal human, to please the gods. And these artists churned this stuff out with only the tiniest nuance of change (upon which the art historians leap with great gusto) for three freaking millenia! Well, except for the Armana period, when everyone had a drooping belly and looked like dying fish, but even that strange and very short period had its rules and regulations. Okay, there was no song of myself in this age. But hey, art is about expression! Happy to say that they often portrayed animals in humorous ways. Probably their way of coloring outside the lines.