Akhenaten

Interpreting this art presents a special set of challenges. First, there is the ques­tion of decontextualisation. Much was deliberately vandalised after Akhenaten's death, so losing its contexts and explanatory texts. Most Amarna art cannot be appreciated in its original setting, in spite of efforts at reconstruction. Images soon take on new valencies once divorced from the circumstances in which they were meant to be displayed and seen. While this is a problem with all images, it is particularly acute with Egyptian religious art, which relies on a complex inter­relationship of word and image to convey its meanings. Perhaps more seriously, the loss of context has resulted in certain categories of Amarna art objects becom­ing canonical 'art pieces' in their own right, without need of context — the sensuous heads with elongated skulls; voluptuous torsos with clinging drapery; blue cera­mics; brilliantly coloured faience inlays with natural scenes, and so on (see Plate 2.5). Museum displays of these objects show them floating and detached, emer­ging from a vague background that places them apparently in some other realm of existence. Here, archaeological history stands before the museum visitor as a detached and fetishised objectivity, mysterious to the viewer. Via the fragment, the past is revealed to the modern viewer, who experiences both without any real

Plate 2.5 Faience inlays from pools at Amarna; height of tallest 7.9 cm. Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology', University College London, invs UC 419A, 420, 421, 472, 476, 509, 24287, 483, 425, 435, 438A, 445, 424, 423, 426.

sense of space or time, past or present, and without any exploration below the surface.⁵⁸ They embody the past only as it exists in the present.

This blurring of present and past via the fragmentary artefact leads to a sec­ond problem with Amarna art: it is often written about as though it were Euro­pean. It is described in the vocabulary of western artistic movements. Aldred and other scholars of Amarna art talk of its mannerism, realism, naturalism, expres­sionism and so on. This is repeated in secondary literature used for teaching university courses on Egyptian art history.³

'' Although starting with Petrie in the 1890s, this tendency developed when the discoveries of the German team who dug at Amarna from 1907 to 1914 began to gain prominence in the 1920s, the First World War having interrupted exhibition and publication. Key discoveries were some spectacular sculptural works, including the famous painted bust of Nefertiti, in the workshop of the sculptor Djehutmose. This find-spot made it easy to put Amarna art pieces in a familiar setting for artistic production, seem­ingly something like a Renaissance atelier. From here, it was easy to co-opt them into a lineage of esteemed ancient civilisations from which western art is sup­posed to have developed. Indeed, perhaps one should not talk about Amarna 'art' at all - maybe representation is a more neutral term. Projecting the concept of 'art' anachronistically and teleologically onto cultures like ancient Egypt, where the production, consumption and viewing of images was quite differently organ­ised, helps sustain the idea that art has a universal value which transcends history (rather like Akhenaten himself).

Third, different kinds of artistic productions survive from Akhenaten's reign. There is more from private and domestic contexts, for instance, than from most other periods of Egyptian history. The Amarna material might look less anomal­ous than it does if more survived to compare it with. Some of these works use techniques which are uncommon at other periods, such as the sunk relief used for offering scenes and the small stelae with images of the royal family (see Plates 2.3 and 7.2, and Figure 7.1). These were displayed in the open air, where sunk relief provides a better contrast of light and shadow than the more usual low relief.