The Thutmosid royal image dominated sculpture from the reign of Thutmose II into that of Thutmose IV, although its expression was manipulated both from ruler to ruler and within each reign as well. Yet the idealized smiling face with broad upper
Figure 40.3 Kneeling statue of Hatshepsut with nemset jars. Granite. Deir el-Bahri. JE 47702. Courtesy Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Cheek bones, naturally arched eyes, long nose widely spread at the base, and broad mouth appears in every case, while the size of each feature and the location and subtlety of modeling varied. The royal sculpture of Hatshepsut, as discussed by Tefnin (1979) and more recently by Keller, Arnold, and Roehrig (Keller 2005a; Arnold 2005) represents the first full statuary programme known from the New Kingdom and demonstrates the ability of the Theban workshops to produce many dozens of life-sized and colossal images with technical excellence and stylistic cohesion (figure 40.3). Yet the face of the queen within those statues could be seen to have changed in a number of ways over the fifteen years of her work at Deir el-Bahri. Only slightly later Thutmose III was able to rebrand Karnak with his distinctive image and went on to do so in temples throughout the Nile Valley (figure 40.4). Dimitri Laboury’s treatment of the vast corpus of Thutmose III’s statues included an internal chronology and a typological analysis indicating both traditional and new types created through the 54-year reign, but Laboury also noted that statue types are less useful in identifying evolution of a portrait over time (Laboury 1998). to the extremely large number of statues of this king and their known architectural settings, Laboury was able to combine stylistic analysis with the evidence from architectural history and thereby provide additional confirmation for his dating of many works. He concluded that Thutmose Ill’s portrait evolved through his reign, breaking eventually away from Hatshepsut’s model only to return at the end of the
Figure 40.4 Sphinx of Thutmose III. Granodiorite. Temple of Karnak. CG 42069. Courtesy Supreme Council of Antiquities
Period to a new youthful look most similar to that of his father Thutmose II. During the period of the ‘‘proscription of Hatshepsut,’’ therefore, Thutmose III’s facial type attempted to obliterate the first fifty years of his own reign, leaving his legacy as his father’s legitimate heir as his last comment (Laboury 1998).
It is the homogeneity of the image that characterizes the art of the Thutmosid era, and that achievement was made possible by the use of standardized production techniques, such as grids, to proportion figures. Recently the Spanish mission in Thebes discovered a drawing tablet with the proportioned figure of Hatshepsut shown frontally on a grid, an obvious technical aid to statue creation (Galan 2007). An aid to the creation of the two-dimensional form of Thutmose III has been in the British Museum (EA 5601) for many years and may have been a companion piece produced in the coregency era (Robins 1994). The canonical grid system enabled large numbers of artisans to work in consistent styles and to complete the relief decoration for Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri, in East Thebes, and elsewhere in Egypt and in Nubia.
World History
