Inlay Depicting the Face of a King
Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BCE)
Ancient Egyptian
Glass; 2 × 1.3 × 0.5 cm (3/4 × 1/2 × 3/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, purchased with funds provided by Henry H. Getty and Charles L. Hutchinson, 1892.170
This inlay of the face of a king shows his face in left profile, with the eye tipped upward. He has rounded cheeks, an aquiline nose, a small, pointed chin, broad lips framed by pronounced lines, and a large ear. A crown made of another piece of inlaid glass would have been fitted to the king’s head.[1] The reddish-brown color of his face follows ancient Egyptian conventions for representing the skin of men.1
This inlay was made in a one-piece, open mold, resulting in a modeled front and a flat back. Both sides are marked with small pits caused by air bubbles that were trapped in the molten glass. The eye is a piece of prefabricated, black-and-white mosaic glass that was inlaid into the red glass. The eyebrow is another strip of black glass, or possibly a line of powdered black glass, that was laid into a shallow recess.2
There are some questions about the manufacture of this inlay. Although the eye and eyebrow are visible on the back (fig. 1), they do not match the front in terms of their shape and placement, indicating that the eye is not a cane of mosaic glass that was inlaid all the way through the red glass. An explanation for this is that the face was reused as a right-facing inlay, and the eye and brow on the reverse were added in glaze.[2]3
Fig. 1
Back of cat. 96.
Figures of the king or gods made of pieces of brightly colored glass first appeared about 1350 BCE. Shortly thereafter they were used in great numbers to decorate many of the objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun. Such inlays continued to be made into the Ptolemaic and early Roman Periods. Initially, pieces of colored glass were inlaid mainly in wood furniture, coffins, and shrines. Later they were used on a broader range of objects, and were even inset into stone reliefs and walls.[3]
4
Provenance
Émile Brugsch (1842–1930), Bulaq Museum and Egyptian Antiquities Service, Cairo; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1892.5
Publication History
Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 129.
6
- For a similar face, but with the crown and upper body preserved, see Richard A. Fazzini and Robert S. Bianchi, eds., Cleopatra’s Egypt: Age of the Ptolemies, exh. cat. (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1988), 108, pl. I.
- Observation of Sidney M. Goldstein, personal communication with author, August 2018.
- Glass (as well as faience and stone) inlay was used to decorate the walls of the temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu (about 1160 BCE) and, according to Uvo Hölscher, hundreds of examples of such inlays were recovered from the temple. Uvo Hölscher, The Excavation of Medinet Habu, vol. 4, The Mortuary Temple of Ramses III, pt. 2, with contributions by Rudolf Anthes, trans. Elizabeth B. Hauser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 40, 42, 45–48, pl. 37. Hölscher notes that the use of inlays on walls predates the time of Ramesses III, but that it “apparently reached the peak of its development under him.” Ibid., 39. For the use of glass inlays on walls in later periods, see Sidney M. Goldstein, Pre-Roman and Early Roman Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, NY: Corning Museum of Glass, 1979), 249–54; Sidney M. Goldstein, “Cat. 80, Fragment of a Floral Inlay,” in Roman Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, ed. Katharine A. Raff (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2016), para. 5–6, accessed August 2, 2018.
Emily Teeter, “Cat. 96 Inlay Depicting the Face of a King,” in Ancient Egyptian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago by Emily Teeter and Ashley F. Arico, ed. Ashley F. Arico (Art Institute of Chicago, 2025), https://doi.org/10.53269/9780865593213/98.
© 2025 by The Art Institute of Chicago. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
