This plaque depicts a woman in the vulture headdress that was worn by queens, goddesses, and priestesses in reliefs and on statuary. Here, the head on the vulture headdress is beautifully detailed. The feathers on the body of the bird take the form of smooth overlapping ovals, while most of the longer feathers on the wing and tail are incised with shallow lines to suggest their comparatively coarser texture and indicate the different layers of feathers that make up the wing. The woman’s wig is shown as rectangular blocks marked with oblique lines to represent the individual strands that make up her curls. Each curl ends with a horizontal band, the bottom of which is drilled to represent the interior of the curl.1

Her face is full and her chin and neck are soft in the style typical of Ptolemaic reliefs. The edge of her nose is rounded and her nostril is indicated by a shallow oval. Her almond-shaped eye has no pupil. The eye has a long cosmetic line and her eyebrow covers the entire distance between the bridge of her nose and the tab on her wig in front of her ear. The edges of her lips are raised in a smile.2

She wears a broad collar composed of six registers of beads. Beginning with the top register and moving down, it is composed of round beads; triangular flowers; open papyrus buds that alternate with small closed buds; rosettes; open and closed lotus buds; and a final edge of ovoid beads. The artist did not depict the collar on her right shoulder beyond the tress of her wig, leaving the area bare.^[1] As is typical of these plaques, there is no trace of pigment.3

The woman’s shoulders are shown frontally. What remains of her breast shows that it was much smaller and not as exaggerated, high, or round in shape as those more typically represented on these relief plaques and on contemporaneous wall reliefs.^[2] It is impossible to determine whether the woman is a deified queen or a goddess. However, because examples showing nonroyal, nondeified beings are rare, it is unlikely that she is a priestess.^[3]4

For more on relief plaques, see About Relief Plaques.5

Provenance

Nicolas George Tano (1866–1924), Cairo; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago through James Henry Breasted as agent, 1919. 6

Publication History

Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 44 (ill.), 45. 7

Emily Teeter, “Egyptian Art,” in “Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago,” special issue, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 20, no. 1 (1994): 28–29, no. 13.8

Roberta Casagrande-Kim, ed., When the Greeks Ruled Egypt: From Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, with contributions by Mary C. Greuel et al., exh. cat. (New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 2014), 66, fig. 4-10; 97, no. 75.9

Karen Manchester, Recasting the Past: Collecting and Presenting Antiquities at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2012), 28.10

Ashley F. Arico and Elizabeth Benge, “A New Look at Faces from the Past,” Art Institute of Chicago ARTicle (blog), March 14, 2019.11