31-Jan-2000 Pharoahs of the Sun
The MFA (Boston Museum of Fine Arts) has had an exhibit of Egyptian stuff from the time of Akhenaten, Nefretiti, and Tutankamen. It's closing next weekend, and we hadn't seen it yet. When Arlene called to get tickets she found that there aren't any available for the weekend. The only time we could go would be during the week. I met her at her school as soon as the kids went home and we went to the museum this afternoon.
I've never been a big Ancient Egypt fan. I looked around the exhibit and tried to get interested in it, but it just wasn't clicking.
Three quarters of the way through the exhibit I saw one sculpture that spoke to me, one sculpture that was worth missing two and a half hours of work for. It was a half-life-size head of Nefretiti in rose quartzite, on loan from the Agyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Berlin. It had never been finished! The contours of the face were fine. The nose was perfect. The lips were polished and the line separating them was razor sharp; I would have been happy to kiss them. But the eyes needed more work, and the sculptor had planned it. The outlines of the eyes, and the eyebrows, and some of the wars, were marked in black where the next carving needed to be done. This beautiful piece of stone was still alive, after 3336 years, patiently waiting for the next step, waiting for the master's touch to complete it. It wasn't just a sculpture; I was looking at the thought processes of an artist across three millenia.
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