Day 16 - Portraits of Amenhotep I

February 1, 2018

Yes, women are depicted wearing beards, as the many statues of Hatshepsut in Gallery 115 prove. The high-ceilinged gallery provides an appropriate display space for the six monumental pink granite sculptures and many smaller ones (one in the form of a sphinx) that, along with a number of busts, arae shown in the room. 

But before I reach the gallery, I make note of two things. First, as many times as I have visited the museum, I have never noticed in the Great Hall two immense sculptures, one of a pharaoh and one of Athena  (the latter found at Pergamon). How is it possible that I have walked past these time and again without seeing them, en route to doing something else- checking my coat, heading to a particular show (or now, a particular room)? It is humbling.

Second, I pass a small wooden shrine that was found in a tomb. The caption notes that the shrine commemorates the death and reaurrection of Osiris. It's a reminder that the idea of resurrection hardly originated with Christianity.

In this gallery, I want to write about something troubling to me: two portrait heads of King Amenhotep I.  One is carved in profile in a shallow relief about 15 inches high.  The king wears a tightly curled wig adorned with two cobras. He has a fleshy nose and relatively small mouth, the lips of which appear to be equal in width. If he weren't wearring the wig, I would think him to be from a Black African country.

The second head is a fragment from the head of a statue, maybe 10 inches high. The ruler faces outward.  His face is painted a reddish-brown, except for his eyes and brows, which are darker.  Aside from two features--his almond-shaped eye (a representational convention) and the noticeable cheekbone under his eye socket-- to me, the two heads have very little in common. The nose of the statue head appears to be straighter; the lower lip is much fleshier than the upper one. My first thought is that this is an idealized image, my second that he looks Caucasian, and I am embarrassed and ashamed by the juxtaposition of these thoughts. When I walk around to look at the bust in right profile, I again see little resemblance.

But this is not what the caption says. The caption reads  "...the shape of the nose and the short upper lip are nearly identical," making clear that the faces are of the same person.  It also says, "The similarities in these works...demonstrate that images of an Egyptian king were probably based on an officially sanctioned likeness that combined recognizable features into an idealized portait of the monarch in question."

I can readily accept this last statement, but I still question whether the two mages of this ruler look similar. What is fact, what opinion? I am decidedly an amateur, but in this respect, does my opinion have so much less validity than that of the experts? I realize that with Ryan, my tutee, I have been trying to draw a bright line between the two, but this example suggests that such a line is sometimes blurry.

On the other hand, when I walk around to see the left profile of the statue, I think it looks a bit more like the relief.  I also realize that experts have seen many, many more statues than I have.  They are in a position to say that these two images resemble each other much more than they do any other representations of rulers. The resemblance is necessarily relative rather than absolute, and exposure and knowledge make experts better able to make informed judgments in situations of ambiguity - or situations that novices like me might see as ambiguous. 

Too much "Law and Order," maybe, but it also makes me wonder whether I could pick out the right suspect in a lineup.