Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Berlin, Germany, 11-15 Oct 2006: Ägyptisches Museum
Berlin's Most Beautiful Woman
   The painted plaster bust of Queen Nefertiti is the jewel of Berlin's Egyptian Collection, currently housed on the upper floor of the Altes Museum. The classic lines of the heavy  flat-topped crown sitting on the head supported by a sleek elongated neck, the deep vibrant colours, and the life-like portrayal of the ageless face, faintly lined at the outer edges of the lips and below the eyes, seem almost modern. Immediately, one senses the palpable tautness of the neck muscles and the regal serenity of her enigmatic one-eyed gaze. Unlike the right eye which possesses a dark crystal pupil, the left was left strangely unadorned. The bust was never complete, but instead probably used as a model in the studio of her great sculptor-creator Thutmose, where she was discovered unperturbed more than 3000 years later in Amarna.Look also at other sculptures of Nefertiti in the museum. This one to the left reveals a youthful Nefertiti with somewhat more filled-out cheeks and a perfectly-shaped cranium. Another shows her more mature, standing with haunched shoulders, breasts drooping over a nascent middle-age paunch. In all these depictions, her person and unmistakable humanness transcend millennia to reach out to, grab and touch us. |
Labels: art, Berlin, Germany, ladies, museum, sculpture
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License
These are the 30 countries that I have ever set foot on. Airport stopovers don't count!
