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We now understand why the statues that do not represent gods are always and uniquely portraits as exact as the artists could render them. Each was a stone body; not an ideal body in which only beauty of form or expression was sought, but a real body in which care should be taken neither to add nor take away anything. If the body of flesh had been ugly, the body of stone must be ugly in the same way, otherwise the double would not find the support it needed. The statue from which the head preserved in the Louvre was broken off was, undoubtedly, the faithful portrait of the individual whose name was engraved on it: if the realism of the expression is somewhat brutal, it is the fault of the model, who had not taken care to be handsome, and not that of the sculptor, who would have been guilty of a sort of impiety if he had altered the physiognomy of his model in the least detail.

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Skhemka lived at Memphis at the end of the Vth Dynasty. He was attached to the administration of the domains, and was buried in the necropolis of Saqqarah. His tomb, discovered by Mariette during the excavations of the Serapeum, furnished three pretty statues to the Louvre.19 I knew the group reproduced here at a time when the coating that covered it had suffered very little; the galleries of Europe possess nothing to be compared with it for finish of execution.