Egypt's Golden Couple by John Darnell

Author:John Darnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Some of the faces are so realistically carved in plaster that we would not be shocked to meet them on the street today: an older woman with creases on her forehead, her lips curved in a slight smile; a girl with the smooth skin of youth, her mouth in a subtle pout; an older man, with crow’s-feet at his eyes, a strong nose and mouth, and a distinctly asymmetrical set to his ears. Before these sculptures would be completed, they too would have been altered to conform, more or less, to the artist’s grid. A final statue placed within a tomb chapel would be an idealized representation of a person’s nature, carved with hieroglyphic texts to confirm their identity. The gypsum plaster casts in the artist’s studio allow us to glimpse the portraits before that stylizing process had begun, one of the rare cases when we can truly look upon the faces of people who lived three thousand years ago.

The studio in which Nefertiti’s bust was discovered was part of a series of workrooms along the side of House P47.2. In its final form, the sprawling villa appears to have been the communal compound of a master sculptor, with multiple artists living in a single enclosed area. A fragment of an artifact from the villa may bear the master artist’s name. Partially preserved on a piece of an ivory horse blinker excavated from one of four tree pits in the complex is the name of “the overseer of works, sculptor Thutmose.” The horse blinker indicates that Thutmose owned a chariot and at least two horses and could afford an expensive material for the tack of those already costly animals.

Borchardt realized that the blinker might have belonged to the owner of one of the major structures in the villa, but he was at first cautious in identifying the name with the master sculptor overseeing the complex. Nevertheless, over time the desire to know the name of the creator of a now universally acclaimed work of art has led to the routine designation of the large compound as the home and studio of the sculptor Thutmose, the artist who carved the bust of Nefertiti.

Ancient Egyptian artists rarely added their own names to their work, and no signed piece of royal sculpture from the reign of Akhenaten appears to be known. To imagine an ancient Egyptian workshop is to abandon the modern conception of the artist as a solitary hero. A scene in the tomb chapel of the vizier Rekhmire, who lived around 1400 BCE, provides a defining illustration of ancient Egyptian artistry. A group of five artists stand and sit as they work on a wooden scaffolding enclosing a standing statue; other workmen appear at the base of the statue itself. Egypt’s artists created their sublimely massive works of stone and wonderfully intricate compositions in paint only by allowing personal artistry to be subsumed by the vision of a great communal work.

The artists’ signatures that are known are primarily from the monuments

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