JOHN ZEAMAN

Ancients

Middle Kingdom Egypt

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Ancient Egyptian art is a marvel of consistency: a seemingly unchanging parade of cobra staffs, mummy cases, hieroglyphics and pharaonic crowns. The dates on museum labels hardly matter. What’s a thousand years here or there?

Now, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted a show about an exciting period in Egyptian culture – the Middle Kingdom (2030–1650 B.C.) – when, it is said, things really did change.

Well, sort of.  Change, when it happens in Egyptian art, is pretty subtle.  And the 400-year flowering of the Middle Kingdom was less an artistic revolution than a glorious revival of forms from … the Old Kingdom.

No matter. This exhibit, with 230 works, is enthralling, a panorama of a culture rich in symbols and images. And one in which art played an essential part in everyday life – and death.  Here you’ll find intriguing pictographic messages, charming animal sculptures, magical objects, sexy jewelry, toylike models of boats and houses, colorful mummy wraps, and the faces of pharaohs named Mentuhotep, Amenemhat, and Senwosret.

A little background. Egypt’s Old Kingdom, which built the great pyramids and the Sphinx at Giza, collapsed around 2181 B.C. In the ensuing chaos, power eventually coalesced along two stretches of the Nile River: Lower Egypt, around the old capitol of Memphis, and Upper Egypt, around the city of Thebes.  After about 100 years, Lower Egypt fell to the armies from Thebes and the Middle Kingdom was born.

In the first gallery, you can see pharaohs wearing the new “double crown” to symbolize unification of the two kingdoms. The elaborate headgear combines the white cone-shaped crown of Upper Egypt inside the red flat-topped crown of Lower Egypt.

One innovation of the Middle Kingdom was a new genre of sculpture called the block statue in which a seated human figure retained the rough shape of the original stone block. Subjects were rendered as if wrapped in a sheet with their knees drawn up.  Their protruding heads and feet make them look like hunkering birds, but the taut fabric between the legs made a good flat surface for hieroglyphs.

You learn more about people’s families in Middle Kingdom art.  The limestone stela of the “Trustworthy Sealer Seneb,” organized into panels like a comic book page, shows the entire family of the deceased.  A stela for a mother who died very young includes an image of her child on the lap of a foster mother, as if to reassure everyone that the baby was being cared for.

Despite their somber function, these tablets are wonderfully lively. incorporating pictographs of eyes, jackals, birds, cobras, beetles and human figures. You may wonder why the counterparts in our culture – gravestones – are so comparatively devoid of anything celebratory or descriptive.

In a gallery devoted to “Royal Women,” you’ll see jewelry worn by a Princess named Sithathoryunet, a relative of  King Amenemhat III.  In addition to bracelets, anklets, and a pectoral necklace, she wore a hip girdle made of stones and cowrie shells.  The shells had erotic associations and were filled with pellets that made a soft sound when the woman walked or danced

Overall, this is not a King Tut type of show, not one that bedazzles with royal luxuries and weighty objects of solid gold. There’s a much bigger cross section of Egyptian society. Many pieces were made for officials in the Middle Kingdom’s vast bureaucracy, such as the powerful vizier (like a prime minister) and the high steward (like a secretary of agriculture). A statue of a bald portly man with powerful arms had the title of “reporter,” the equivalent of today’s press secretary.

A painted relief immortalizes a seemingly unglamorous event, a government inspector’s tour of food and manufacturing facilities.  Tellingly, his entourage includes several bodyguards, a man wielding an ax (for breaking down doors?) and his spotted dog, Ankhu.

Other characters who populate this show include a seal bearer, butler, chamberlain to the treasurer, storage overseerers, servants, musicians, dancers, jewelers, nurses, and a class of person described as “elite women of the provinces.”

At the pinnacle of this society was the pharaoh, who was represented somewhat differently in the art of the Middle Kingdom.  Instead of the idealized personages of the Old Kingdom, these new pharaohs have individualized faces.

“Amenemhat III Wearing the White Crown,” shows a man with prominent cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes with pouches underneath and crisply outlined lips. It’s hard to tell how old he is supposed to be. His skin appears smooth, but also loose on the bone.

No one knows if this is an accurate representation of the pharaoh, but the realism is telling. It seems to reflect a new attitude, an open acknowledgement that the pharaoh, though still technically a god, is also a regular human being. And in ancient Egypt, that really was a big change.

 

 

 

 

Pergamon

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History is highlights for most of us.  We tend to skip from the story of Alexander the Great straight to that of Cleopatra and Marc Antony.   But between those cinematic personalities was a fascinating period of 300 years when Alexander’s empire was transformed into a gigantic advertisement for Greek culture.

This was the Hellenistic age. Think of Ionic columns and classical pediments adorning cities from modern-day Turkey to Pakistan.  Think of these people speaking Greek, worshipping Zeus and Athena and enjoying plays by Euripides and Aeschylus.

Perhaps this story has never made a great movie, but it makes great art history. And now, coming to a museum near you  is “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World,” a stunning show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that brings the ancient world to life with statues of gods and kings, images of a lost city, reliefs of thrilling battles, gold jewelry, coins, and engraved gemstones.

The star of the show is the ancient city of Pergamon, now known as Bergama, in present-day Turkey.  A citadel perched on a mountain ridge above the Caikos River valley, Pergamon did a spectacular imitation of fifth century B.C. Athens in second century B.C. Asia Minor.  Pergamon’s Attalid rulers transformed a simple garrison into a showplace of Greek culture with royal palaces, a library of more than 200,000 scrolls, a museum, a temple to Dionysos, a theater, gymnasiums, and, the crowning jewel – a magnificent altar facing the sea.

Paintings, panoramic videos of then and now, and a gleaming white model give visitors an idea of what this opulent pile looked like. The focus is on the famous altar, a mix of Oriental splendor and Greek humanism that looks like a cross between a giant parade reviewing stand and a wedding cake.

One of the show’s standout images is the 11-foot-wide painting of the acropolis by Freidrich von Thiersch, an architect from an 1881 German excavation.  He enlivened his image with hundreds of tiny figures, including a long procession of people and animals ascending to the sacrificial altar where a chimney sends up the smoke of burnt offerings.

The 1995 model — one-twentieth the size of the original – gives you a better idea of the altar’s famous reliefs. On the outside was the so-called Gigantomachy, depicting a violent battle between the Greek Olympian gods and the terrifying giants of the earth. At stake is the order of the universe, and fortunately the gods are clearly overwhelming the clumsy giants. Everything is wild movement and fluttering drapery with some relief figures actually spilling out of the wall onto the altar steps.

A few frieze fragments help convey the flavor of the fantastic imagery, including a serpent’s head that was actually the foot of one of the bizarre giants.

Unlike the Gigantomachy, the 12-piece Telephos Frieze on the altar’s inside walls is a sequenced narrative.  It tells the story of the demi-god hero Telephos, a descendant of Hercules and an Attalid princess. One panel illustrates the scene where Hercules finds the abandoned infant Telephos suckling on a lioness.

This is a show with surprises of scale. The signature image  – an evocative  fragment of a young man’s head cut off just below the eyes – doesn’t prepare you for its colossal size.  The youth’s dimpled chin is massive, his neck the width of a tree trunk.  It was found on the upper terrace of the Pergamon gymnasium and is thought to be a head of Alexander.

The first gallery of the exhibit, devoted to the “Age of Alexander.”

Another titanic presence is the towering statue of Athena Parthenos. It’s a smaller copy of the one that stands in the Athenian Acropolis but at 13 feet, it towers above all else here.

Hellenistic sculpture could be baroque in its frenzied movement, but also excelled at a new sculptural realism. One of the show’s masterpieces is “Dying Gaul,” a larger than life figure of a wounded warrior who struggles to support himself on one shaky arm. Although made to celebrate a victory by Pergamon over the Celtic tribes, it shows great empathy for the enemy.

History catches up with the Hellenistic age at exhibit’s end where a set of reliefs show the naval battle of Actium. Here, the ships of Octavian (the future Augustus Caesar) defeated the Egyptian fleet of Cleopatra and Marc Antony.  The playfulness of the little figures scampering about the decks of the galley ships enlivens the art, even as it belies the gravity of the event, which ushered in the era of Imperial Rome.

As for Pergamon, its flowering was relatively brief. The last Attalid ruler died in 133 B.C. The city enjoyed prominence for a while as the Roman capital of Asia, but ultimately people abandoned its craggy heights for the more comfortable valley below. The opulent citadel was left to crumble until the 1870s when the first German archaeologists arrived.

 

 

Cleopatra’s Needle

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 How old do you think the oldest structure in New York City is?  Most people would guess something from the Dutch Colonial period – dating back to the 1650s or 1660s. That would make it no older than 360 years.

In truth, the oldest structure in New York City is roughly 3,460 years old. It’s a granite obelisk called Cleopatra’s Needle.

Maybe that’s cheating a bit, since the 69-foot artifact has really only been in the city since 1880. It stands today as a wonderful anomaly, anchored to the ground in the leafy environs of Central Park.

Cleopatra’s Needle is one of a pair commissioned by the pharaoh Thutmose III in about 1450 B.C. for the city of Heliopolis.  In about 12 B.C., Augustus Caesar moved them both to the port of Alexandria where they were reinstalled in front of the monument that Cleopatra built to honor the “god” Julius Caesar.  They’ve both taken their knocks over the years, enduring falls, erosion, water damage and acid rain.  One of them ended up in London.  The one that’s here, looks pretty good for its age. Its still-decipherable hieroglyphs pay tribute to two later pharaohs, Ramesses II and Osorkon I.

Now, as the Central Park Conservancy develops a plan to conserve it, the Metropolitan Museum – which has several nice views of the monument in its back yard – has mounted a show about its history and the symbolism of obelisks over the centuries.

There you can see a delicate limestone relief of Thutmose III, its finely carved edges as crisp as if it was just stamped out of clay.  Thutmose faces a similar relief of Ramesses II.  Despite the rigid stylization of features like the bound-up beard and the cobra headdress, their faces are individualized. Thutmose has a bigger nose, fuller lips and narrower eyes than Ramesses.  Ramesses (1303 BC to 1213 BC),  also called Ramesses the Great, is the most legendary of the pharaohs.  He conquered many lands, fathered more than 100 children, and is said to be the inspiration for Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.”

Obelisks come in all sizes, from the 550-foot Washington Monument in our capital down to a cute funerary pair from the Met’s own collection. These are less than two-feet tall, dating all the way back to the Old Kingdom – more than 4,000 years ago.

Transporting the 193-ton Cleopatra’s Needle from Alexandria and installing it on Greywacke Knoll in Central Park was a yearlong production, involving wooden support towers, cannonball rollers, a team of 32 horses and a special s railroad trestle that ran from the East River at 96th Street to the park.  Even more amazing is that the ancient Egyptians were able to make and move it with nothing but human labor and ingenuity.   Exhibit diagrams show how it was carved from a bed of solid granite, which involved tunneling under it, then raising to a vertical position using wedges and ropes, then floating down the Nile on a barge.

Obelisks caught on big in Western culture, first with the Romans, who built so many that Rome today has more obelisks than any other city in the world.  Although the Egyptians saw them as cosmological connectors between sky and earth, the Romans liked them mostly as symbols of imperial power.  They toppled when Rome fell and were excavated and re-erected about a thousand years later in the Renaissance.  Pope Sixtus V, who put up four of them, liked them as symbols of papal authority.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the fraternal order of the Freemasons readily adopted obelisks as one of many symbols in their Hermetic tradition, a mixture of ancient Egyptian, Greek and Christian beliefs.  The exhibit also shows how obelisks became popular funerary monuments that evoked feelings of eternity.

The exhibit devotes little comment to the 20th century’s Freudian interpretation of obelisks as phallic symbols. But then, beyond mentioning it, what else is there to say on that subject?

 

 

 

 

 

Mummy Portraits

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No one really knows what ancient Greek painting looked like. According to the writers of the time, painting was one of the supreme accomplishments of that culture. But, while Greek sculpture and pottery survived, the paintings crumbled away with the wooden panels on which they were painted.

The closest thing we have are first century Roman wall paintings, such as those excavated from Pompeii, and several hundred Egyptian “mummy portraits.” These latter were painted by Greek or Roman artists during the period of Roman rule, mostly in the first and second centuries. Though painted on wood, they have survived to this day just as the mummies did – because of the protection of the outer coffin and the dry Egyptian climate.

What’s most striking about these pictures is their naturalism. Unlike Egyptian art of the previous 2,500 years, which is heavily stylized, these pictures are realistic, executed in the Greek tradition of three-quarter view, with a single light source casting shadows and highlights on the face.

Perhaps because of their hybrid origins – neither purely Greek nor purely Egyptian – they occupy an odd corner in art history.

Now about 70 of these rare and fragile works are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a show titled “Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits From Roman Egypt.” Ancient or classical art may impress us with its beauty, but we rarely feel close to it. Not so, here. These people seem warm, alive, and even familiar. They look straight out at us with large, moist eyes and frank expressions.

There is nothing false, no apparent attempts to flatter, as there is in so much portraiture. Perhaps this is because the subjects were dead when the paintings were made, but, in fact, no one knows if that’s true. Because so many of them are young, in the prime of life, it has been suggested that they were done years before the subjects’ death, and perhaps hung in the home before being used for funereal purposes. But recent CAT scans of the mummies reveal that the people inside the wrappings were about the same age at death as the faces in the portraits appear, suggesting that they were done posthumously.

If so, the artists who painted them were quite gifted at creating the appearance of a life portrait, giving the faces specific expressions and the kind of presence that seems far removed from a corpse.

Many of the mummies come from an oasis west of the Nile valley known as the Fayum, so many in fact, that they were once called Fayum portraits.

The painted panels were part of the inner layer of coverings in the mummification process, put directly over the face and held in place by the linen wrappings. Seen in that context, they look oddly out of place, both because of the painting style (we expect one of those rigidly symmetrical Egyptian faces, more an idealization than likeness) and because the people are dressed and adorned like Romans. Roman styles of dress, hairstyles, and jewelry were in vogue all across the empire.

 

However, although they may have adopted Roman ways, and although many of these people may have been of mixed ethnicities (Roman Egypt was a truly multicultural society), they clearly retained traditional Egyptian religious beliefs about the afterlife, or at least felt connected to Egyptian traditions. The most vivid of these portraits were done in encaustic, a beeswax-based medium that resists drying, fading, and cracking. At the same time, the waxy paint retains the brush strokes, and gives these works a directness and painterliness that looks almost modern.

Unlike the idealizations of the deceased that characterize ancient Egyptian burial portraits, those of the Roman period are highly particular. The artists didn’t flinch at including flaws or oddities such as wrinkles, bags under the eyes, asymmetries, or double chins. We see the wispy beginnings of beards and moustaches on young men, a mole on the side of a man’s nose, even a surgical scar under a boy’s eye. A woman has ears as pointy as a fox’s, and almost every face has large, dark soulful eyes, some rimmed with black eyeliner. A man, apparently an athlete, appears shirtless, allowing us to see his arched deltoid muscles.

Posthumous portraits often betray a funereal feel – something creeps into the expression – but the people in these pictures are so vital and engaging that it’s easy to forget the picture’s function. A cherubic boy gazes out at us with the same kind of innocence and promise that we might see today in a Communion or bar mitzvah picture. The women sport a variety of hairdos, from those with a profusion of ringlets and curls to ones pulled severely back.

So much is unknown about these pictures. We don’t know the names of the subjects or the artists. We don’t know how the subjects died, or much about how they lived beyond the clues found in dress or jewelry. And yet, despite a gap of 2,000 years, they are as real to us as the faces in the daily newspaper.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

2000

 

 

The Met’s New Greek Galleries

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Can Greek art still thrill us? After 2,500 years? The Metropolitan Museum of Art is betting that it can, betting about $45 million, in fact – the price tag for the recently unveiled renovated galleries for Greek art.

The centerpiece of these beautiful spaces is a grand vaulted gallery off the main entrance’s Great Hall, a 140-foot-long space which previously functioned mostly as a corridor to the restaurant. For years, visitors on their way to lunch ran a curious gantlet of Cypriot statues – dozens of short, berobed, blank-eyed figures with jutting beards – that were the pride of the museum’s first director, General Luigi Palma di Cesnola.

A marble capital and finial in the form of a sphinx, circa 530 B.C.

The Greek art could be found in adjacent and upstairs galleries that had none of the visibility or polish of the museum’s prized spaces, the kind of galleries where you saw earnest young art students with sketch pads taking measure of torsos and noble heads.

Now, it’s all been dressed up and redesigned with the Met’s usual panache. The great barrel-vaulted, coffered ceiling of the main gallery is itself a thing of beauty, its three skylights reopened after being blacked out during World War II. The light they admit, reflecting off new limestone walls and augmented with recessed spotlights, gives the marble statues an almost magical luminosity.

 

The six adjacent galleries, three on each side, now opens invitingly through new doorways into the central space, and display the cream of the Met’s collection from the sixth through the fourth centuries B.C. The works, the cleaning of which was a big part of the project, include heroic marble statues and funerary monuments, painted vases and terra cottas, rare bronzes and delicate work in glass and gold. Instead of displaying them in the usual scholarly style – by type and period – many different kinds of objects have been grouped to illustrate themes such as death, warfare, love, and farewells.

The new galleries, and the ones to come, conform closely to the original plans drawn up by the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White in 1912. Visitors now follow a chronological progression beginning with the two galleries for prehistoric and ancient Greek art (these opened in 1996), then through the seven new galleries that just opened. And, when the final phase is completed in several years, the space now occupied by the cafeteria will become the galleries for Roman art, which is where they originally were, and a new restaurant will be built above the Lehman Wing.

Just what is so special about Greek art, that we should be still looking at it near the dawn of the Third Millennium?

The Egyptians were making art long before the Greeks, and, as can be seen in the first galleries, early Greek art looks Egyptian, with its stiff, profiled poses and boxy geometric designs. But it was the Greeks who made the leap into naturalism, and, in their renderings of the human body created an ideal of perfectly balanced proportions that has never been improved upon.

That’s what’s amazing about the Greeks, not only in their art, but in their philosophy, literature, and drama. We are accustomed to the idea of human cultural evolution, of art becoming better and more sophisticated over the centuries, and here, confounding all of that, are these people who seemed to put it all together, all by themselves, in just a century or two.

So, with Greek art, the appeal is in the timelessness, the shock of the old. We say Greek and Roman in the same breath, but the greatest accomplishments of Greek art were five centuries old by the time the Romans started copying them. Its principles resurfaced in the Renaissance about a thousand years after the fall of Rome, and they’ve been with us ever since.

Consider the Athenian Panathenaic amphorae, large vases that were once filled with olive oil and given as prizes to victors in athletic and equestrian contests held in honor of Athena, patron goddess of Athens. Naked runners with powerful horse-like flanks sprint across the pot’s surface, their legs overlapping in a scene that conveys all the animation and excitement of a marathon finish today.

The Euphronios calyx-krater depicts an episode from Homer’s “Iliad” in which Sleep and Death transport the fallen Sarpedon – blood pouring from his wounds – to his native Lycia for burial.

Marble sarcophagus with the Triumph of Dionysos and the Seasons. Roman, circa. A.D. 260–270. Culture: Roman

Many of the marble statues here are actually Roman copies of Greek sculptures, but an intact Greek original in marble, the New York Kouros, dates to about 580 B.C. Its angular body and rigid pose still shows the influence of the Egyptians.

A touching relief, perhaps done by one of the artists who worked on the Parthenon, shows a young girl bidding farewell to her pet doves.

Small fourth-century statuettes represent fashionable women or girls elegantly wrapped in thin cloaks, often wearing sun hats and holding fans. Their naturalness and vitality seems fresh, almost modern, to us today and remind us how open and adept the Greeks were at depicting every side of the human personality.

 

Old Kingdom Egypt

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Westerners regard ancient Egypt with a mixture of wonder and morbid fascination: the stark monumentality of the pyramids; the awesome power of the pharaoh; the obsession with death and the afterlife; the hidden tombs and mummification practices. The picture is of culture that was dark, fanatical, even sinister.

It requires something of an adjustment, then, to get in the right frame of mind for “Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For the art on display seems to have been produced by a people who had a confident, positive outlook on life; who had strong bodies and alert, satisfied expressions; who took pleasure in their work; who were tender and affectionate with one another, and who lived in a bountiful environment teeming with wildlife, birds, and fish.

This is the art of the Old Kingdom. And when you’re talking ancient Egypt, old is really old. As Met director Philippe de Montebello pointed out, the Met’s famed Temple of Dendur, which dates to the first century A.D., is closer in time to the present day than it is to the Old Kingdom, a period that lasted from 2650 to 2150 B.C. and covered Third through the Sixth dynasties.

This is not treasure like that of King Tut’s tomb, with gold thrones, mummy cases, and the like. Those things were likely looted thousands of years ago, and melted down or otherwise destroyed. But what the robbers left behind, the wall reliefs and statues in ordinary stone, are no less valuable as art.

All Egyptian art had a religious purpose: to create a parallel world for the deceased to inhabit in the afterlife. Statues of people, carvings of animals, weren’t made to be looked at and admired. Likenesses were meant as future dwelling places for a person’s “ka,” or life force, and, as such, were destined for the burial chambers, where they would never be seen by anyone.

The capital of the Old Kingdom was Memphis, a city south of Cairo on the west bank of the Nile. The pyramids that are the period’s best known accomplishment are evoked here in a huge photograph and in several models showing interior construction and burial chamber locations.

Although the Egyptians idealized faces and figures, many statues here are clearly likenesses of specific people, as, for example, in the seated figure of a Third Dynasty princess, whose wide, heavy mouth contrasts with the fine-featured faces of two flanking figures.

Egyptian stylization can look stiff, but the opposite is true in relief blocks from the Tomb Chapel of Metjen, showing delicately incised antelopes, which sniff, graze, and look anxiously behind.

From the Fourth Dynasty, the reign of King Snefru, comes an alabaster figure of a woman that probably represents an ideal of feminine beauty for that time. She is high-waisted and narrow-hipped. Her full wig encircles her head like an inverted U, and the forms of her legs within her tight skirt show as dark shadows in the translucent yellowish stone. She is detailed down to the cuticles on her fingernails.

Although she is sculpted in the round, she stands rigidly, shoulders squared, arms flat at her sides – demonstrating that the Egyptian preference for symmetry, frontality, and strong silhouettes – so common in the reliefs – was clearly an aesthetic decision and not the result of a weakness in drawing.

One of the strangest pieces in the show comes from the Fourth Dynasty reign of King Khufu: a lifesize sculpture of a seated man identified as “overseer of every construction project of the king,” no small job given that Khufu was responsible for the Great Pyramid at Giza. This man is neither handsome nor fit, though he does look confident. He is corpulent and wears only a short sarong, which makes him look like a contemporary businessman in a sauna, lacking only the cigar to make the picture complete.

A mystery of the show are the so-called “Reserve Heads.” These disembodied heads – hairless and somewhat androgynous – were once thought to serve as burial chamber spares, for the deceased to use in case his mummified head was damaged. More likely, they were made for people who couldn’t afford a full body sculpture.

King Khafre was the builder of the second, smaller pyramid at Giza, and also initiated the carving from natural rock of the imposing Sphinx, which, judging by a sculpture of him, was also a likeness. Both king and lion-bodied man have the same squarish face, wide mouth, and broad cheekbones, not to mention the flared, cobra-like headdress.

Images of marital contentment can be seen in sculptures of husbands and wives – sometimes king and queen – in which the two stand side by side as if posing for a photograph. In a typical gesture, the wife entwines one arm around her husband’s waist, and in one of the more ribald, a husband’s hand rests on his wife’s breast.

From the Fifth Dynasty come small, charming figures of ordinary people doing everyday things, like the animated little butcher bent over the trussed carcass of an ox. Or the nursing woman under siege from two hungry babies.

Were the Egyptians so content and well adjusted, despite their death-oriented culture, as their art makes them seem? Perhaps not. It would be a mistake to see their art as a faithful reflection of reality. If you were populating an afterlife for yourself, as well as the form that your soul would inhabit, certainly you would choose the most ideal vessels.

And yet, art tells us about a culture’s values. The art of the ancient Assyrians with its ferociously aggressive figures reflected that society’s warlike nature. From their art, it’s clear that the Egyptians were far from dark and sinister. They were a people who knew and valued the good life, in the best sense.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

1999