Found in an artist’s studio, this stunning bust exemplifies a change in style, and may have been an early prototype.
Thutmose, Model Bust of Queen Nefertiti, c. 1340 BCE, limestone and plaster, New Kingdom, 18th dynasty, Amarna Period (Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection/Neues Museum, Berlin)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:11] We’re in the Neues Museum in Berlin, and we’re looking at the famous bust of Nefertiti. It is a life size, full color image and it’s really impressive.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:15] It’s the treasure of this museum. It’s been placed in a rotunda with a large dome. She’s been placed slightly higher than eye level so we look up at her. She’s fabulously beautiful.
Dr. Zucker: [0:29] She’s virtually the sole work of art in this very large space. Clearly, she is the focal point.
Dr. Harris: [0:42] Yes, quite theatrical. Unlike so many other Egyptian sculptures, she wasn’t intended for a tomb. She was found in the studio of the artist who made her, Thutmose.
Dr. Zucker: [0:46] We think that this sculpture was actually a model that he had created in order to work on other sculptures of her. That is, this sculpture would function really as a three-dimensional sketch.
Dr. Harris: [0:57] As a prototype.
Dr. Zucker: [0:58] That’s right. There are a few reasons why that’s thought. Not only was it found in his studio, but it is incomplete in a way that suggests that it was never meant to be completed. If you look, for instance, at the sockets of the eyes, that would generally be inlaid with semiprecious stones, but only one eye has any inlay in it, and in that case, it’s temporary material, even wax. Not the kind of quality one would expect in a full-fledged sculpture for the queen.
Dr. Harris: [1:24] Art historians have discovered through scientific analysis that she’s made not just of painted limestone, but limestone that’s been covered with a very, very thin layer of plaster. And that enabled the sculptor to achieve really subtle effects, modeling her face.
Dr. Zucker: [1:42] But in the neck and headdress, plaster gets much thicker and it would have been much easier to work and create that very fine detail on the plaster rather than the coarser material of the limestone core.
Dr. Harris: [1:59] And that’s so important, where we see the lines, the very subtle movement around her cheeks. What’s so remarkable about this sculpture is how sensitively carved she is, how we really get a sense of skin and bone and these lovely movements around her face.
Dr. Zucker: [2:11] She’s tremendously elegant. But even beyond the simple elegance of the contours of her face, her high cheekbones, the shallow of her cheeks.
Dr. Harris: [2:19] Her long neck.
Dr. Zucker: [2:20] Beautiful symmetry, a way in which line is unified throughout the entire portrait bust. For instance, follow the lines downward that are constructed by the contours of her headdress, that tapers as it moves towards her chin, so her face and headdress create a perfect triangle, but that’s actually continued by the lines of her neck below her chin.
[2:44] It’s accentuated by the lighting in this museum, but it really does create this sense of continuity from the top of the sculpture to its base.
Dr. Harris: [2:49] What we’re describing is a new ideal of beauty that’s really different from the tradition of ancient Egyptian sculpture. That’s because Nefertiti was the wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who established a new religion in ancient Egypt, which was monotheistic instead of the traditional polytheistic religion.
[0:00] And with that, he created a new ideal of beauty that we see in the sculptures that were created during his reign.
Dr. Zucker: [3:16] That’s right. I think we see this sculpture really as a perfect exemplar. Nefertiti is especially interesting because we believe she did not simply function as the wife of the pharaoh. She is shown in so many portraits with the accoutrements of the ruler that we think that she actually shared power.
Dr. Harris: [3:31] It’s interesting, this period that we call the Amarna period, of Akhenaten’s reign, where we have two powerful women, his mother Tiye and his wife, Nefertiti.
Dr. Zucker: [3:42] Both represented as beautiful women, as powerful women, and giving us a kind of insight into late Egyptian culture.
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Backstory
In 2009, the refurbished Neues Museum in Berlin celebrated its reopening, with the bust of Nefertiti prominently displayed as one of its main attractions. The celebration coincided with one of the Egyptian government’s repeated pleas for the official return of the bust to Egypt. The museum has staunchly refused to give up the sculpture, asserting that the bust was acquired legally by the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt in 1912. Borchardt had excavated it along with several other objects from the studio of the ancient Egyptian sculptor Thutmose, and had brought his finds to Germany as part of an agreement with the Egyptian Antiquities Service. While there is no proof that Borchardt’s dealings were explicitly illegal, as early as 1925, the Egyptian government began to take issue with Germany’s possession of valuable antiquities. They began imposing sanctions, and the bust has been the source of tension between the two nations ever since.
This controversy relates to a general growing public awareness about the provenance—and politics—of antiquities held in European and American museums. In 2016, Nora al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles, two artists from Germany, made a bold statement about these issues by staging an event they called “NefertitiHack.” They secretly mapped the sculpture using a consumer-grade 3-D scanning device, and then released the data openly under a Creative Commons license. The artists’ intention was “to inspire a critical reassessment of today’s conditions and to overcome the colonial notion of possession in Germany,” according to their website.
Many groups have advocated for using digitally-produced replicas either as stand-ins for objects that are returned to their places of origin, or vice versa—as ways of offering highly accurate replicas in place of the originals. The sharing of data between institutions and groups who lay claim to objects has also been suggested as a way to ease tensions over restitution. Nelles and al-Badri’s project is a critical statement about the growing questions around repatriation and public access to objects via 3-D models and other data, as the Neues Museum does not allow photography or publicly share its own 3-D model of the bust.
Nora al-Badri, one of the artists behind NefertitiHack, stated:
The head of Nefertiti represents all the other millions of stolen and looted artifacts all over the world currently happening, for example, in Syria, Iraq, and in Egypt…Archaeological artifacts as a cultural memory originate for the most part from the Global South; however, a vast number of important objects can be found in Western museums and private collections. We should face the fact that the colonial structures continue to exist today and still produce their inherent symbolic struggles.
Over a century after it was excavated, the bust of Nefertiti remains a flashpoint for institutions and the public, driving us to consider the ways in which objects and their data are acquired, displayed, and shared.
Backstory by Dr. Naraelle Hohensee
