When visitors to the Field Museum look into the somber, careworn face of Egyptian Pharaoh Sesostris III this spring and summer, they will see a work of art that is both 3,800 years old and startlingly revolutionary.
The granite statue–one of the most prized objects in the British Museum–was remarkable in its time because it reflected real emotion. In traditional Egyptian art, human faces usually were generically bland, with a slight smile.
Sesostris III, by contrast, “has the look of a piece of modern sculpture, conveying a sense of emotion, of sorrow and melancholy,” said the Field’s David Foster. Historians believe the pharaoh ordered royal artisans to depart from tradition as a crafty bit of political image-building, to show the masses he worried for their well-being.
Many thousands of people are expected to get to know Sesostris III and other ancient personages beginning next month in the Field, which is hosting an unusual traveling exhibit, “Eternal Egypt,” from April 25 to Aug. 10.
The exhibit, looking at 3,000 years of artistry in the time of the pharaohs, draws on 144 objects from London’s British Museum, the largest Egyptian collection in the world outside of Egypt.
Before leaving England in 2001 for an unprecedented tour of major American museums, many of the pieces had been on exhibit in the London museum since the mid-19th Century, when they were taken there from Egypt. Most had never left England.
The British Museum agreed to let the pieces go on tour as an alternative to putting them in storage during renovations of its Egyptian galleries.
“Several pieces in the show are the premier in the world of their type, such as fragments from the Book of the Dead [and] a scroll of paintings on papyrus made by the great New Kingdom scribe Ani,” said Foster, the Field’s project coordinator for the exhibit.
Masters of technique
The exhibit was conceived and put together by Edna R. Russman, Egyptian curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and it shows how Egyptian art developed and changed in the extraordinarily long history of pharaonic rule, starting in 3100 B.C. and stretching hundreds of years past the time of Christ.
Ancient Egyptians didn’t invent art, but its artists were disciplined, undisputed masters of aesthetic technique among early civilizations, creating a style and genre that are as instantly recognizable today as they were 2,000, 3,000 and even 5,000 years ago.
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To many people, the term “Egyptian art” might conjure up images of beautiful but stolid sculptures and human figures frozen in oddly angular, sticklike poses as they parade across crumbling temple walls and papyrus scrolls.
Those stylistic elements did indeed dominate Egyptian art for more than 3,000 years, and the exhibit explains why.
Today, the extremely conservative ancient Egyptians would be labeled consummate fanatics for the “retro look.” To them, the old ways were always the best ways.
Throughout their history, Egyptian leaders commanded their subjects to follow the religious beliefs and symbolism that evolved in the earliest years of pharaonic dynasties.
That meant artists had to pay attention to how things had always been done stylistically. For hundreds of years, statues of Egyptian kings and queens uniformly had the same poses and the same, usually slender body types. Kings and other males almost always were portrayed with their left foot forward; queens and other females had their feet together.
“The striding left foot forward perhaps was given to male figures to reflect a sense of vigor and their assertive role in society,” said Robert Ritner, a University of Chicago Egyptologist. “The side-by-side feet of standing female figures perhaps symbolized more passive roles for women.”
Still, Egyptian art also managed to change over the centuries, whether to adapt to shifting religious and political attitudes or because of artists whose genius managed to shine through dogmatic tradition.
The dramatically different portrait of Sesostris III, a Middle Kingdom pharaoh who reigned from 1836 to 1818 B.C., tells part of that story.
“Instead of a bland, happy expression, you have a careworn frown, reflecting the burden of kingship,” Ritner said. “Instead of simply showing himself as the absolute deity, it portrays him as the good shepherd of his people, still divine, but more a steward of the kingdom.”
Akhenaten and Nefertiti
Akhenaten, the renegade pharaoh 500 years after Sesostris III, also upset artistic conventions by sponsoring a striking, sensual style. Surviving portraits of him and his queen, Nefertiti, now rank as some of the greatest and most recognizable examples of Egyptian art.
But in his time Akhenaten was reviled as heretical. He is represented in the exhibit with fragments of his likeness that were ordered destroyed by his successor, Tutankhamen, when artistic styles reverted to traditional forms.
“As you follow the art through the exhibit,” Foster said, “you see the repeated florescence and decline of the culture. When it had strong, stable leaders, it was manifested in the art, both in quality and quantity. In periods of decline, you begin to see more crude, provincial-looking art.”
But all the art was considered utilitarian, Ritner said, created in the service of religion.
“Each piece is designed to have a real function, to assure the eternal life of the person depicted,” he said.
Over the years, artists gradually increased the amount of hieroglyphic script carved into the statues, Ritner said. Some of the sculpture in the last dynasties are almost covered in writing, relating the accomplishments of the person and recommending him for eternal afterlife.
The exhibit features objects in a wide range of sizes, from tiny bits of jewelry to portions of colossal statues, and a variety of materials, including wood, stone, papyrus and gold.
The largest pieces are a massive, 3-ton head from a 26-foot-high statue of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten’s father, recovered from his funerary temple in Thebes, and a 7,000-pound, red granite lion found in a temple in Sudan, both acquired by the British Museum in 1835.
There are no mummies, but the exhibit’s showstoppers may well be painted coffins, a gold-encrusted female mummy mask and a Roman-era coffin lid portrait of a beautiful woman.
Funerary boat
Among the Field’s own extensive collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts are several pieces that relate directly to objects in the traveling exhibit.
One of the monumental objects on tour is a 7-foot column capital from a temple to the cat goddess Bastet in the Nile delta city of Bubastis. The Field owns dozens of mummified cats from that temple, with about two dozen displayed.
Most notably, the museum has Sesostris III’s funerary boat, recovered from the pyramid complex where he was buried near Cairo.
Extremely rare, it was excavated in 1894 and given to the Field in 1900 by Mrs. Cyrus McCormick.
Because the exact age of the boat is known, University of Chicago scientists were able to use a small fragment from the boat in 1951 to test the accuracy of their newly invented Carbon-14 dating method.
A section in the exhibit on the artists themselves shows practice work by Egyptian student artists, rough drafts by masters and examples of their tools.
It shows, too, how Egyptian sculptors would draw a grid of squares on a block of stone, using the grid to make sure they adhered to strictly prescribed proportions of the human form–setting standardized distances between the top of the head and the tip of the nose, for example.
“By the 26th Dynasty, around 600 B.C.,” said Ritner, “the standard proportions being used by Egyptian sculptors were adopted by a group of provincials across the Mediterranean Sea known as the Greeks, and so Egyptian art became relevant to Western art history.”
Coming from the British Museum
More than 140 objects from London’s British Museum are part of the “Eternal Egypt” exhibit, coming to the Field Museum April 25 to Aug. 10. A few highlights:
Standing statue of Sesostris III
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(1874-1855 B.C.)
One of the exhibit’s most famous pieces, this statue shows the pharaoh in an attitude of prayer, one of the earliest examples of royal figures in this devotional pose.
A scene from the Book of the Dead
(1336-1294 B.C.)
A group of mortuary spells written on papyrus and placed in tombs to help the dead reach the afterlife.
Panel portrait of a woman
(A.D. 160-170)
The piece is a prime example of Greco-Roman portraits that were placed on mummies. Coming from the British Museum