One way Egyptian artists expressed the concept of immortality was by repeating artistic conventions that had been used for thousands of years. One of the oldest such traditions was the simplification of the human body, which was reduced to its fundamental, most recognizable shape. Here the face is in profile, but the eye and the chest are depicted frontally. While these formal conventions continued to be honored after the Greeks came to rule Egypt during the Ptolemaic period, the new kings also imposed their own taste. The soft flesh of the face and the small, rounded nose are drawn from naturalistic Greek sculpture and are reminiscent of artworks seen at the court of the Ptolemies in the new capital of Alexandria.
Date
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Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1923), p. 44-45 (ill.).
Karen B. Alexander, “From Plaster to Stone: Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago,” in Karen Manchester, Recasting the Past: Collecting and Presenting Antiquities at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 28.
Roberta Casagrande-Kim, ed., When the Greeks Ruled Egypt: From Alexander the Great to Cleopatra. Exh. cat. (New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 22, 97, fig. 1-5, cat. 74.
Art Institute of Chicago, Ancient Art Galleries, Gallery 154A, April 20, 1994 - February 6, 2012.
Art Institute of Chicago, When the Greeks Ruled: Egypt After Alexander the Great, October 31, 2013 - July 27, 2014; traveled to New York City, NY, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, October 8, 2014 - January 4, 2015.
Panayotis Kyticas, Cairo; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago through James Henry Breasted as agent, 1919.
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