The Amarna Period

The art style of the reign of Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten was an innovation in itself, but changes in royal iconography amplified its revolutionary aspects. The king’s ‘‘new style’’ changed the proportions of the human body in order to produce the newly elongated neck and torso of the ruler atop his shorter lower leg (Robins 1993, 1994). The new 20-grid square standing figure was not applied only to the king, however, and all Amarna art reflected the changed body type. The earliest examples of the ‘‘new style’’ are the sandstone colossi of the king from his Karnak complex of the Gempaaten. On these thirty or so figures the royal face, like the king’s body, is elongated with a knobby chin, long spreading nose, and thick lips that protrude nearly as far forward as the nose. The eyes are long narrow ovoids set deep in the face with hollowed lids. The ears of the king are likewise long and narrow and for the first time show earring holes; the neck bears two deep incised creases. These last elements are innovations in representation that were retained throughout the New Kingdom, despite the return to traditional forms at the end of the dynasty (figure 40.10).

As has recently been noted, these standing (not striding) figures of Amenhotep IV display numerous artisan changes and recarvings that were sometimes hidden by the attachments to square pillars or by placement above normal eye height (Freed 1999b; Kozloff 2008a). The first application of the king’s proportional switch from 18 to 20 grid squares in addition to large changes in the shape of the head, shoulders, waist,

Figure 40.10 Colossus of Amenhotep IV. Sandstone. East Karnak. JE 49529. Courtesy Supreme Council of Antiquities.

And hips of the ruler led with no surprise to the artisans’ adjustments. A similar set of alterations appeared on the relief figures of Sety I on the interior of the north wall of the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, where artists changed figures many times to introduce the newer pose of the king leaning forward toward the king (Brand 2000). All of these changes were well hidden when surface plaster and painting were accomplished, but it reminds us that the Egyptian artists themselves needed to adjust to new styles. They resorted, as in the reign of Hatshepsut, to the use of the grid to accomplish stylistic changes, and evidence ofit continued to be visible on monuments throughout the reign (Laboury 2008).

As with the stylistic innovation, the royal regalia worn by the ruler on his sandstone colossi were inventive. The nemes headdress was combined with the four feathers of the god Shu, and the khat headdress was topped with the double crown. On the king’s torso and arms raised rectangles bore the cartouches of the king’s god Aten in a manner that is visually assertive. Body elements such as nipples and navels are exaggerated in size and depth, and the ultimate result of these and the heavily carved facial features is the creation of multiple surfaces that caught the changing daylight. Akhenaten’s iconography was solar, and his artisans carved his statues to illustrate the sun disc’s interaction with the king.

The evidence of other royal statuary at Karnak is largely fragmentary, but from Amarna many elements of the king’s statue programmes exist, including works in granodiorite, quartzite, and granite, although, with the exception of some statuettes, most are represented by statue parts only. Life-sized torsos and heads of the king and Nefertiti in indurated limestone had the Aten’s cartouches incised on them, but no longer atop raised rectangles (Aldred 1973). Most of these statues are life-sized or smaller, and, when indications of pose are available, frequently standing statues have arms bent perhaps to grasp altars or offering tables. Relief representations of standing colossi are known from the Aten temples, however. A seated granodiorite pair statue of Akhenaten and Nefertiti has recently been partially reconstructed from fragments originally from the sculptor Thutmose’s workshop (Thompson and Laboury n. d.). The larger royal statuary was represented at the site of the limestone boundary stelae where groups of the royal family were carved out of the gebel as offering groups that included the royal couple and daughters (Reeves 2001).

The Amarna style underwent modifications at the new residence city, being closer to Karnak's extreme angular form in the earliest years and considerably less so at the end. The use of composite statue techniques may have contributed to some of the changes in the Amarna style. As Dorothea Arnold has discussed, fashioning composite sculptures of several stone types that fit together with tenon and slot methods facilitated the reduction of such traditional elements as back pillars or heavy negative spaces (Arnold 1996b). Some unusual - and rare - materials could be employed to produce the composite sculpture, as witnessed in the yellow jasper face variously referred to as either Tiyi or Nefertiti. A further benefit for the sculptors was greater freedom to explore the volumes of statue heads when working them alone rather than as a part of a large rectilinear block. Ultimately, however, it is impossible to state conclusively that the production of composite statuary was a choice or a result of specific artistic responses to the resources in an isolated environment.

Among the accentuated elements of Amarna sculpture was a continued increase in images of royal females, particularly in separate figures. More than 50 pieces were left in the Thutmose complex, representing images of the royal family, and several were bald egg-shaped heads of princesses fashioned of lustrous brown quartzite. These highly exaggerated forms echo, on the one hand, the angle of the long head of Akhenaten wearing the khepresh or white crowns but, on the other, carry their own iconographic value. As ‘‘egg-heads,’’ the accent on youth and rebirth is suggested, particularly expressive of the Amarna philosophy of life’s daily re-creation (Arnold 1996b; Arnold 1996d; Gabolde 2008) (figure 40.11). The bodies of these princess heads have not been identified, but a couple of headless ones in similar quartzite material are sculpted with swollen belly, pubus, thighs and buttocks, along with a slit-like navel slightly open at the center. These elements appear to have been most consistent in relief and statuary in the middle years of the reign, a time when the face

Figure 40.11 Head of princess. Quartzite. Amarna. Berlin 21.223. bpk/jAgyptisches Museum und Papyrussamlung, SMB.

Of Nefertiti was given its own type - with a square jaw and horizontal mouth, and a notably more vertical pitch from the chin to the top of the crown (Arnold 1996a). The new image far better accommodated the queen’s signature flat-topped headdress and appears on the remarkable limestone Berlin bust of Nefertiti. Other statue heads of the queen were found prepared with tenons but without headdresses that would have been in different materials. It is interesting to speculate on what crowns the queen might have worn on the completed images, since relief scenes show Nefertiti (or Meritaten) wearing a broad range of crowns, including the khepresh and a version of the Hemhemet crown, in addition to the plumed Hathoric and flat - topped crowns (Davies 1904; Arnold 1996d; Reeves 2001; Gabolde 2008). The creation of the queen’s face as a model image did not change the princesses’ facial types; they continued to carry their father’s features, but the invention did signal that the power of the female ruler was ascendant.

In the post-Amarna reigns of Tutankhamun and Ay sculpture reflected the demands made on artisans to abandon the new style and grid of Akhenaten without total rejection of some of the Amarna preferences. Rita Freed described one group of Amun statues as follows: ‘‘These include a soft, fleshy face with high cheekbones, naturalistic eyes, and the full lips particularly reminiscent of Akhenaten’s family in the later Amarna years - as well as pierced ears, a fullness at the breast, a flaccid torso, and a full, drooping abdomen’’ (Freed 1999; Eaton-Krauss 2008). Such a description is entirely applicable to images of these rulers, who returned to traditional types including colossal striding images out of quartzite and colossal seated ones as well. Appropriately, Freed notes that another group of statues of Amun ‘‘are closer to the traditional pre-Amarna style,’’ and she concluded that these statues represented two workshops (Freed 1999a; Eaton-Krauss 2008), although in the aftermath of the abandonment of Akhetaten, Karnak temple could well have employed sculptors working in both styles. In a desire to link the post-Amarna rulers with the earlier era, the style of Amenhotep III was particularly embraced, perhaps more by Tutankhamun than his successors (Martin 1989; Eaton-Krauss, 2008). The complexity of discussing art of the post-Amarna era is exemplified by the tomb statues of Tutankhamun that show both traditional bodily proportions and Amarnesque ones as well; yet the presence of royal tomb objects made for other Amarna period rulers, such as Ankhkheprure Neferneferuaten, within the Tutankhamun material makes a clear path of stylistic development extremely difficult to identify (Vandersleyen 1984-5; Laboury 2002; Gabolde 2008). More useful is the approach taken by Eaton-Krauss who has discussed the statue types that were among the preferred ones made during the post-Amarna period. Eaton-Krauss pointed, as have others, to the very large number of statues of Amun that were produced to replace those destroyed by Akhenaten’s minions. In addition to statues of Amun, groups of the king with Amun and Mut were carved, and groups of Amun behind a smaller or kneeling king particularly stressed the return of the god’s role in conferring rulership. Eaton-Krauss noted that this type continued to be produced in nearly identical form by Horemheb, as did the large colossal seated statues made for the mortuary temple of Ay and usurped by Horemheb (Eaton-Krauss 2008). Despite the similarity in the post-Amarna facial features, the youthful faces with fleshier features can be reasonably identified with Tutankhamun, while the blander features with more horizontal and thinner mouths appear to stem from the last years of the dynasty.

During the Amarna era non-royal statuary both within Amarna and at sites such as Saqqara and Thebes was largely confined to the tomb environment, since elites did not dedicate sculpture in the temples. A few small-scale figures are known, particularly from the sculptor Bak’s workshop, one of the larger ones being a false-door type of statue that holds images of Bak and his wife (Berlin jAM 31009) (Freed 1999a). In the reign of Tutankhamun, however, the restoration can be identified even before the monumental royal inscriptions refer to it as one views the burst of non-royal sculpture made for tombs and temples. Scribal and block statues were placed in the Ptah temple of Memphis, the great Amun temple of Karnak, and elsewhere, while separate and group tomb statues were made for Memphite elites, such as Maya (Horemheb from Memphis, MMA 23.10.1), Yuy (Brooklyn Museum 66.174.1), and Maya and Meryt (Leiden AST 3) (Schneider and Raven 1981; Freed 1999a). The emphasis on naturalism in the Amarna period persists in the post-Amarna sculpture, and even the old-age indicators seen on images of Nefertiti were applied to tomb statues such as that of a woman now in the Florence Archaeological Museum. Likewise the hollowed cheeks and bone structure of a mature woman may be seen on the otherwise beautiful wife of Nakhtmin (Egyptian Museum CG779B). (Saleh and Sourouzian 1987; Arnold 1996c) (figure 40.12). Most of the royal

Figure 40.12 Wife of Nakhtmin. Indurated limestone. Akhmim. CG 779B. Courtesy Supreme Council of Antiquities.

And non-royal statue types attested during the post-Amarna era existed before Akhenaten’s reign, but a few adaptations were made. For example, the standard-bearer forms had been known for royal statues at least since the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty but were now also dedicated by private people (Russmann 1989).

Horemheb’s reign signals for many the beginning of the Nineteenth Dynasty, politically and art historically. However, the sculpture bearing his name does not entirely support that view. In his Valley of the Kings tomb the artists were clearly charged with creating a cohesive style that largely emulated the reign of Amenhotep III, and the figures of Horemheb were carved and painted with a traditional idealized body type, albeit proportioned with a slightly shortened leg. However, because Horemheb usurped so many post-Amarna statues from Tutankhamun and Ay, his face and body in statuary most frequently continues to resemble the practice of the preceding period. A dyad of granodiorite depicting the king and his wife Mutnodjmet (Turin Inv. 1379) does appear to have originated in Horemheb’s reign, and the bodies

Of the royal pair are idealizing without the flaccid bellies seen on most post-Amarna sculpture (Scamuzzi 1965). The king’s statue is headless, but the queen’s face, despite mutilation, displays smaller more natural-shaped eyes than those of Tutankhamun and Ay. The high and prominent cheek bones suggest a similarity with the Florence woman’s statue mentioned above. The queen’s regalia include a tri-partite wig in small curls, overlain by a vulture headdress, a double uraeus, and a modius, a rather traditional composite of queen’s regalia that is compatible with the inscription on the rear of the statue that claims the king’s appointment to rule by Amun and other deities.