This head and portion of the right shoulder from this statue of an official show his broad, triangular face with high cheekbones; narrow, slightly pointed chin; large, almond-shaped eyes with rims; eyebrows that are shown as slight swellings; and long, rectangular philtrum between the upper lip and nose. His full upper and lower lips barely meet at their slightly downturned corners. What remains of his nose suggests it was small, without flare on the sides of the nostrils. His chin is taut on its underside. His ears are large, with a distinct outer edge (helix); the other parts of the ears are less detailed. There is very little modeling on his face other than the planes formed by his cheekbones and the vertical surface of the sides of his cheeks, features that emphasize the frontality of the head. The overall expression is one of blankness, and therefore without character.1

The man wears a heavy wig that flares at the sides. It falls to the top of his shoulders and is cut obliquely in the front, forming points at his neck that are longer than the back of the wig. The front is marked with broad, evenly spaced stripes that run horizontally across the forehead and straight down from the top of the ears to the shoulder. The back of the wig is thick, standing away from the shoulders to emphasize the bulk of the hair. It is scored with small inverted “V”s that start from roughly the middle of the wig and increase in size as they approach the top, creating a very abstract representation of hair.2

Date

The style of the wig places this statue in the late Middle Kingdom. That date is further supported by the selection of the hard, dark stone. In the Old Kingdom, most statues of the nonroyal elite were made of wood or, more commonly, limestone, which could be painted to resemble a more prestigious type of stone. At that time, hard stones like granite, serpentine, quartzite, and diorite were used primarily for images of the king and his family.^[1] By the Middle Kingdom, these hard stones began to be used for statues of the nonroyal elite.3

The face suggests a date more specifically in Dynasty 13, when earlier conventions—including clearly modeled features, furrows in the brow, nasolabial folds, and well-defined, plastic eyebrows, all of which gave these images a sense of individuality—were replaced by a “mannered idealism” that resulted in expressionless representations.^[2]4

Function

This statue was probably created to function in the funerary cult of the now unnamed man it represents. Such statues were thought to be receptacles in which the ka (spirit) of the deceased resided. The statue was the accessible form of the deceased, for the mummy was buried in the inaccessible burial chamber of the tomb. Initially, statues were placed in tomb chapels where, as the representatives of the dead, they received offerings to sustain the deceased in the afterlife. One of the most common funerary texts calls upon the king and the god(s) to give bread, beer, oxen, and fowl to the ka of the deceased. Because in theory the dead lived on forever, the favored material for cult statues was imperishable stone.5

In the Old Kingdom, most statues were enclosed in a small tomb chamber called a serdab. The serdab was inaccessible other than by a small slit in the wall that allowed incense and prayers to reach the statue. By the Middle Kingdom, statues were moved to more visible locations in shrines and chapels in tomb courtyards, where friends and family of the deceased could have more direct communication with them. In the Middle Kingdom, statues of individuals were also placed in temples where—still functioning as representatives of the deceased—they could receive offerings and also absorb the prayers and piety of the sacred setting.^[3]6

Most Middle Kingdom statues show the individual seated on a chair, standing on the ground with arms to the sides, or as an abstracted cube (see cat. 19). Here, there is no sign of a back pillar below the wig, as would be expected for a standing statue, suggesting that this head may have belonged to a seated figure.^[4]7

The granite used for the statue marks it as a very prestigious monument that only a person of means, most assuredly a member of the state administration, could afford. Granite was very hard to work, as evidenced by the lack of polish and fine detail on this head. The imperfect finishing may also be a reflection of reduced access to the most skilled craftsmen who had previously been attached to the royal court, and whose talents are attested to by the beautifully finished granite royal statues from the comparatively more stable and prosperous Dynasty 12.8

Additional Views of Cat. 17

Acquisition

This head, along with cats. 12 and 15, was acquired in Cairo for the Art Institute by James Henry Breasted in 1919 from the dealer Panayotis Kyticas. It was among the very choice objects that Breasted selected to further the Art Institute’s desire to display objects that illustrated aspects of Egyptian art (see cats. 1, 7, 10, 12–16, 27, 43). He enthusiastically classed it “among the best of … such Middle Kingdom portraits.”^[5]9

Provenance

Panayotis Kyticas, Cairo; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago through James Henry Breasted as agent, 1919.10

Publication History

Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 51 (ill.).11

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): 20 (ill.), 21.12

Emily Teeter, Karen B. Alexander, and Mary C. Greuel, Art of the Ancient Mediterranean World: Egypt, Greece, Italy, with contributions by Edmund Barry Gaither et al., teacher manual (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001), 14.13

Karen B. Alexander, “From Plaster to Stone: Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago,” in Recasting the Past: Collecting and Presenting Antiquities at the Art Institute of Chicago, by Karen Manchester (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2012), 28.14

Simon Connor, Être et paraître: statues royales et privées de la fin du Moyen Empire et de la Deuxième Période intermédiaire (1850-1550 av. J.-C.) (London: Golden House, 2020), 71, 164, 228, 290, pl. 53 fig. 2.10.2n.15