Inspirations: Hepworth, Shelley
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
- Seated Colossus of Ramesses II
Entrance to Temple of Luxor
ca. 1279-1213 B.C.
Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis
Hepworth’s singular way of seeing was triggered by a lecture she heard on Egyptian sculpture as a seven-year-old schoolgirl. The lecture was given by her headmistress at Wakefield Girls High School and, as Hepworth put it, “fired me off”. From then on, she wrote, everything was “forms, shapes and textures”. When her father drove her across the countryside in his car, all she saw was sculpture. The car became her hands as she “felt and touched the contours of the hills”.
Colossi of Ramesses II at Memphis
How these master carvers achieved perfect surfaces on this scale with simple tools was beyond my comprehension. My own twenty years’ experience provided no clue. But clearly this was not the work of slaves. This forty-foot length of stone could only have been brought to life through the sensitive hand and watchful eye of a master sculptor, and with a great deal of loving care.
Stuart M. Edelson
More about the Colossus of Ramesses II
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And Wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
More about Ramesses II
Colossal bust of Ramesses II, the ‘Younger Memnon’
From the Ramesseum, Thebes
Egypt 19th Dynasty, about 1250 BC