Questão 741181

Questão 40

Text 7 to answer questions from 40 to 42.

1____It is one of the greatest things in Egyptian art that all

the statues, paintings and architectural forms seem to fall

into place as if they obeyed one law. We call such a law,

4 which all creations of a people seem to obey, a “style”. The

rules which govern all Egyptian art give every individual

work the effect of poise and austere harmony.

7____The Egyptian style comprised a set of very strict laws,

which every artist had to learn from his earliest youth.

Seated statues had to have their hands on their knees; men

10 had to be painted with darker skin than women; the

appearance of every god was strictly laid down. Every artist

also had to learn the art of beautiful script. He had to cut the

13 images and symbols of the hieroglyphs clearly and

accurately in stone. But once he had mastered all these rules

he had finished his apprenticeship. No one wanted anything

16 different, no one asked him to be “original”. On the

contrary, he was probably considered the best artist who

could make his statues most like the admired monuments of

19 the past. So it happened that in the course of three thousand

years or more art changed very little. Everything that was

considered good and beautiful in the age of the pyramids

22 was held to be just as excellent a thousand years later.

Granted, new fashions appeared, and new subjects were

demanded of the artists, but their mode of representing man

25 and nature remained essentially the same.

Only one man ever shook the iron bars of the Egyptian

style. He was a king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Amenophis

28 IV, a heretic. He broke with many of the customs hallowed

by age-old tradition. He did not wish to pay homage to the

many strangely shaped gods of his people. For him only one

31 god was supreme, Aten, whom he worshipped and whom he

had represented in the shape of the sun-disk sending down

its rays, each one endowed with a hand. He called himself

34 Akhnaten, after his god, and he moved his court out of reach

35 of the priests of the other gods.

The pictures that he commissioned must have shocked

the Egyptians of his day by their novel character. In them

38 none of the solemn and rigid dignity of the earlier Pharaohs

was to be found. Instead, he had himself depicted lifting his

daughter on to his knee, walking with his wife Nefertiti in

41 the garden, leaning on a stick, beneath the blessing sun.

Some of his portraits show him as an ugly man; perhaps he

wanted the artists to portray him in all his human frailty.

44 Akhnaten’s successor was Tutankhamun, whose tomb with

its treasures was discovered in 1922. Some of these works

are still in the modern style of the Aten religion. The back of

47 the king’s throne shows the king and queen in a homely

idyll. He is sitting on his chair in an attitude which might

have appalled the strict conservative – almost lolling, by

50 Egyptian standards. His wife is no smaller than he is, and

gently puts her hand on his shoulder while the Sun-god

52 again is stretching his hands in blessing down to them.

_{Gombrich, E. H. The Story of Art. Phaidon, 16th. Ed. 1995. pp.65-6, with adaptations.}

Regarding the grammatical aspects of the text, mark the following items as right (C) or wrong (E).

The two instances of “whom” in “whom he worshipped and whom he had represented” (lines 31 and 32) can, in an informal context, be replaced with who, but “whom” and “who” play very distinct grammar roles in a sentence.