The Gods Are Very Much With Us

In 1972 I studied the architecture of the Egyptian New Kingdom, or Empire, as my directing professor, Dr. Alexander Badawy called it, and our major text, A History of Egyptian Architecture, by Badawy, identifies these monumental scuptures at Luxor Temple as (see page 237)belonging to Ramses II and his wife Nefertari. (He then goes on to identify two standing statues at Amun and Amunet at Karnak Temple.) Whilst our ARCE OC group was examining these very handsome statues, our group was told that they are no less than Amun and Amunet, fashioned after the idealized likenesses of Horemheb and his wife. It's possible that Horemheb usurped these works and that their primary benefactor was Tutankhamun, then Aye. I've always been fascinated by troubling attributions and mis- or confused identifications. I spent some time examining these statues because something grabbed me when I was looking at them. I was struggling with the patterns worn by the female statue. If you are able to come in close to her torso and upper thighs, being careful to watch the tracery of the wing patterns descending down towards her feet, you just might be rewarded with yet another Amarna period design. This past Wednesday, whilst my gal Isabel and I were at the Tutankhamun exhibit at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, I saw these self-same wing patterns on the gold foil bodies of several gods and ushabti, incredibly carefully executed scalloped lines denoting feathers,and I couldn't help but instantly recall Amunet. Wing patterns on royal sculptures are common in the
New Kingdom. Into the Late Period, when private persons adopted royal customs and
elevated themselves into the hierarchy of royal status, the care with which artisans recreated these designs slipped, as did the media with which they worked. But the wing patterns of the earlier sculptures set the bar high for all artists who came later. Compare the exactness and care used in the inlays still extant from the Old
Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and then the New Kingdom, paying close attention to how they reached their zenith with the funerary objects of Thuya and Yuya, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, and then Aye and Horemheb. Of course, we exact correlations because between the fantastic gold coffin of Thuya, and those of Tutankhamun, we cannot, to date, compare such objects with anything having belonged to later burials. But in the case of sculptures such as Amun and Amunet, we see the designs and they have survived the millenia, standing out-of-doors in the sun and moonlight of Luxor Temple. If you see something of Tutankhamun in Amun's face, I, too, see something there. If you see Ankhesenamun in the statue of Amunet, here at Luxor or at Karnak, then, perhaps, like me, you feel a grave sadness, relfecting on the shortness of their lives and the passage of time. The tenuous reign of the boy king and the usurping of his works by later Pharaohs may belie what came afterwards but the care and attention to the 18th dynasty patterns remain and there is nothing tenuous about their beauty. For all the time that has come and gone, and for all the time which is passing and will continue, we know for whom these pieces were designed, even if they are misappropriated by conflicting scholarly reports. They were designed for
Amun and Amunet and they are still very much with us.

The Amarna Stela: Looking at ancient Egyptian Art

Splayed perspective is not only an ancient Egyptian art conceit but it is perhaps the best recognized worldwide. How great then is the contrast between Amarna examples of bas relief and fresco painting in comparison to the art which came before and after the collapse of the Atenist cult?
I remember my first trip to the Cairo Museum, fresh from some time in Athens, Greece, when I looked up at the colossal sculptures of Akhenaten and I wondered then, as I still do now, if there were any form of entasis used in the execution of the works, inasmuch as the columns of the Parthenon, for example, were designed to slant upwards in order to create a more harmonious effect in the overall scheme of the architecture. When I stood directly below the face of Akhenaten, I tried to see as if this could be the case in the exaggerated features of the Pharaoh but I didn't see it. I have just come back from the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibit at the new De Young Museum in San Francisco and, again, I looked at the face of Akhenaten, wondering about the distortions and the affects they had and do have on viewers. I pointed out to my daughter that the cloth/nemes head-dress was surmounted by stylized Maat feathers, which one can readily see from a side glance. This piece was meant to be seen from the sides as well as the front, I would say, otherwise the full affect of the rebus writing (Maat, Speaker of Truth) ould not be appreciated. Now, looking at the photograph of one of the boundary stelae from Amarna, the distortions are again easy to see: the so-called spindly arms and legs, the convex thighs and the overall splayed perspective. But what is the affect on the viewer? I find this problem fascinating. I have looked again and again at the faces of Amenhotep III and his chief wife-consort Tiye, and I saw again the upturned, almond eyes of the king and the fierce and beautiful expressions of his wife. There is a lot of visual psychology here; that is, the overall impact of the portraiture could suggest the impression that the father of Amenhotep IV/ Akhenaten was a sort of laid-back fellow but his wife was vigilant, and that the move from the old capital(and the old ways of showing royals) to the new city of Amarna allowed for innovations and experiments in the royal artworks: the exaggerated portraiture, the move towards more naturalistic works, the fresh fresco paintings in the palaces and the garden pictures, and the overall feeling that this was an experiment on many levels, most of which faded back into the desert once Tutakhamun and his successor Aye died and Horemheb began his campaign of using up the talatat from Amarna to fill his 9th pylon at Karnak.

I must say that when I saw the tomb of Meryre, I was astonished by the sheer beauty of the painted images on the brilliant gypsum plaster, utterly and thoroughly astonished and thrilled. Even the subject of the Pharaoh and his Queen Nefertiti in their chariots with a large police escort running around them and beside them, suggesting that the royals were not safe, not even in this new capital, still, I was overcome by the layout of the scene, the sheer depth of the bas reliefs, the shadows cast in the cut plaster---this one thing really got to me---felt as if it had been created quite recently and the feel of the artist's tools, the sweat of the hours of work, seemed to move in the very room! That is the impression with which I was left and still am. The brilliance of the paints and the plaster, the open-air qualities of the rooms and the entrances, especially in comparison with the other 18th dynasty burial chambers, both before and after Akhenaten's reign. As I think, even now, of the carved images, my thoughts go back to the shadows and how they influence the compositions. And I have looked again and again at the Akhetaten boundary stelae
with this in mind: how do these contrast between light and dark make me feel, about art, about the Amarna Era, about the Gestalt of it? It is a complex and very engaging exercise for me. From the most elegant single papyrus stalk erected at Karnak by Thutmosis III, a gorgeous, dramatic, regal statement of power and design, to the heavier figures of Aye and Tutankhamun on a field of thick ochre-imbued yellows in the latter's romb, in the Opening of the Mouth scene, there, in the middle is this seeming aberration, the enormous figures of Akhenaten and his wife cut deeply into the plaster, with great energy both in its cutting and design and also in the subject matter.
We expect grand artwork in public settings such as Karnak and Luxor; we expect the ritual scenes in tombs. What we haven't seen before or
since are the personal scenes we get in the Amarnan works, the glimpses of daily life, companionship between husband and wife and children, and the sheer energy of those scenes, produced in materials chosen for their easier transport (the talatat,for example) or for their ability to dry quickly and to cover up poor stone quality in rock-cut tombs (the plaster).
There are so many interpretations of what might have happened to cause this pharaoh to become the Atenist he did, to move the capital for self-protection, self-indulgence---to be sure---and for a purposeful change in the status quo. What did emerge was the art. We may not know as much as we may want to about this Era but the impressions left by the stelae, the bas reliefs and the layout of the city
and its structures cause an affect on the viewers. I hope we all keep looking.