Nefertiti may come home at last
Image via Wikipedia
Nefertiti is at the center of a dispute between two nations reminiscent of the epic of Helen of Troy. The bust has been in Germany for nine decades and visitors come from all over the world to admire her eternal beauty. Almost a century after her discovery, the meaning of her name still holds the promise of her return: “The Beautiful One has Come”. I take this news with a grain of salt, and so does my friend Andie Byrnes in her post at Egyptology News.
An Egyptian-German committee is looking into the possibility of having the iconic bust of Queen Nefertiti transfered to el-Tawhid Museum, in Minya, about 240km south of Cairo, when it opens next year.
The head of the German Institute of Archaeology said that the German members of the committee will let their Egyptian counterparts know whether the statue will return to Egypt in time for the opening ceremony or not. El-Tawhid Museum will also include monuments related to Akhenaten. There will be a main building in the shape of a pyramid with floors, including display halls, a restoration school, a space for open shows, an administrative section and a bookshop. Tourist boats will be able to dock in a small harbor on the Nile by the museum.
Meanwhile, Egypt wants to borrow another four antiquities from Germany to be displayed at the opening ceremony of the Grand Egyptian Museum in 2011. Zahi Hawass, the Secretary-General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that the German Hildesheim Museum had agreed to lending Egypt a statue of the builder of Cheops (Khufu), the Great Pyramid. Egypt has also asked to borrow five antiquities from other countries to be displayed at the opening ceremony, including the Rosetta Stone, displayed in the Britain Museum, and the Celestial Sphere, displayed in the Louvre Museum, Paris. Hawass has disclosed that France has refused to lend Egypt the Celestial Sphere, as it might get damaged, while the British stipulate certain conditions for Egypt’s borrowing the Rosetta Stone.
Rare Amarna sculpture to be auctioned at Sotheby
A fragmentary statue of an Amarna princess from ancient Egypt is expected to garner between $400,000 and $600,000 (US) at an upcoming Sotheby’s auction in New York.
The sculpture (ca. 1347-1345 B.C.) measures 34.3 cm (13 1/2 in.) in height. It was carved from nummulitic limestone, a hard material composed largely of fossils dating from the Eocene Epoch (57.8 to 36.6 million years ago) and found abundantly in the Sahara Desert. The work most definitely comes from Akhetaten (modern-day Tell el-Amarna).
The sculpture probably represents either Meretaten or Meketaten, one of six daughters sired by Akhenaten and Nefertiti, the pharaoh’s beguilingly beautiful queen. What remains of the princess’ right arm is tucked under her breasts. A hand resting on her right shoulder suggests that the statue was once part of a larger composition, the princess’ sister presumably having once stood directly to her left. The sculptor’s emphasis on the girl’s pronounced pubic mound, most likely an overt reference to fertility and creation, is consonant with similar works from the same period.
Giacometti, The Egyptian: The Altes Museum organizes an exhibition showing the Swiss sculptor’s passion for ancient Egypt
Image by joelogon via Flickr
Now integrated into the sculpture halls of the Egyptian Museum’s permanent exhibition, works by Giacometti from the Sammlung der Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung in Zurich invite visitors to listen in to a dialogue between artists as they communicate with each other in a common language of forms which traverses several millennia. By being placed in this context, Giacometti’s work reveals how steadfastly rooted in the past it is, as well as allowing the art of the Ancient Egyptians to once again exude an extraordinary freshness and relevance.
Unlike other modern artists, Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) lived obsessed by Egyptian aesthetics. The Altes Museum in Berlin celebrates the Egiptomania of Alberto Giacometti through twelve sculptures and two sketches by the Swiss sculptor, which today share the same space with the bust of Nefertiti and other works from the museum’s extensive Egyptian collection.
Cult of the Artist: Giacometti, the Egyptian, creates risky analogies between the mute and serene pose of ancient statues from the distant past and the famous elongated sculptures forged in the twentieth century. This experiment is the fruit of labor of two Egyptian art enthusiasts, Wildung and Christian Klemm, members of the sculptor’s foundation in Zurich, who stressed the “Egyptian” in Giacometti, as seen in the “structure” of his works, “the intensity in the gaze” of his characters, and “the spatial distribution of his figures.”
Next to Nefertiti, a muse for Berliners who see in her the most beautiful woman in this city, the spectator finds a bust of Annette Arm, the flesh and blood muse who Giacometti met in Geneva and whom he married in 1949, back in Paris, the city that most inspired him and where he lived for many years. The statuette on a large pedestal, 1952, shows clear plastic symmetries with the figure of an Egyptian gravedigger dating from 1850 BC. The most monumental work of Giacometti in this show is that of the Marching Man, which is oddly contrasted with a wooden figure only ten centimeters in height from 1900 BC. Equally curious parallels exist between the Cube in bronze by the sculptor, with engravings, and the granite statue in the form of a cube of Senenmut, full of hieroglyphics.
The exhibition runs through February 15, 2009.
Extracted and translated from elpais.com
