Maverick Pharaohs and the Egyptian Art of Royal Reinvention

Among the virtues of an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, “Maverick Kings: Three Visionary Pharaohs of Egypt’s Golden Age,” is the emphasis on connoisseurship. Sounds old-fashioned, don’t you think? Attending to the wall labels, a museumgoer will encounter hints of the ideological throat-clearing we’ve become accustomed to in recent years from our cultural institutions. There’s a mild apologia for colonialism here, a tolerable soupçon of gender-bending there, and an unnecessary sop to contemporary sensibilities with the inclusion of Awol Erizku’s neon elegy, “Nefertiti (Black Power),” from 2018.Mostly, “Maverick Kings” is dedicated to seeing. “Egyptian art,” a didactic text informs us, “maintained a remarkable continuity over three thousand years . . . still, every period, every reign has its distinctive style, and imaginative artists and patrons could bend the rules.” The artisans who worked their way through thirty-something dynasties hewed to a rigid stylistic regimen keyed explicitly to religious and social tenets, the latter two of which were often promiscuously blended. “Walk Like An Egyptian” the Bangles sang to us back in 1986, and I daresay you’ll conjure up a concomitant image that hews to the popular standard.Head of Amenhotep, 1390-1352 BC. Detail. Museum of Fine Arts, BostonAll the same, a top-down society is ruled by specific individuals, and their tastes will be felt whether they result from hook, crook or diktat. “Maverick Kings” is dedicated to three pharaohs from the Eighteenth Dynasty, a spate of time dated between 1550–1295 BC. Though the show includes items borrowed from museums in Berlin, Cleveland, Fort Worth, and New York City, the majority of pieces hail from the collection of the Boston MFA. “The richness and depth of our Egyptian collection,” writes senior curator Lawrence Berman, “never cease to amaze me.” Those who have previously visited the MFA’s Egyptian galleries will nod their heads in agreement.Hatshepsut was among the most maverick of kings, if only because of her sex, but she wasn’t the first woman to rule Egypt. That designation belongs to Sobekneferu, whose sovereignty predates Hatshepsut’s by some three hundred years. Still, Hatshepsut was a mover and shaker. She came to power upon the death of her husband, Thutmose II, and with an heir who was all of two years old. She did PR work to bolster her authority by claiming to be sired by a sun god, Amun-Ra. Ruling during a time of economic prosperity, Hatshepsut oversaw a slew of significant architectural projects.In “Seated Statue of Hatshepsut” and “Statue Fragment of Hatshepsut” you can see how sculptors struggled to accommodate the strictures of a patriarchal tradition with the reality of a woman monarch. The overall contours are softened, the lips made fuller, and the torso undergoes a subtle and almost lyrical swelling, thereby transforming a chest into a bosom. A related strain of anatomical specificity was a hallmark of Amenhotep III’s kingdom with the MFA taking note, somewhat impolitely, of effigies that spotlight his snub nose, thick lips and chubbiness. Could you pull Amenhotep out of a police lineup by referring to a stunning quartzite effigy in which he’s masquerading as Osiris? The answer must be in the affirmative.Seated Statue of Hatshepsut, 1473–1458 BC. Detail. Museum of Fine Arts, BostonAmenhotep’s son, Akhenaten, was proof that the apple can fall far from the tree. Unlike his father, Akhenaten was hugely unpopular, primarily due to his abrupt transformation of a polytheistic society into one that subsisted on a single deity, Aten. A new iconography was subsequently called for, one predicated less on the afterlife and more on the here-and-now. The resulting imagery became less taut, sometimes ill-shaped and even goofy in outline. A limestone relief, “Fragment of a boundary stele with Nefertiti and two princesses,” does Akhenaten’s famous wife no favors in terms of bodymaxxing. Their son, Tutankhamun, reversed course on dad’s agenda directly upon ascending the throne to the gratitude of the Egyptian people.Keep an eye trained on the subtle, sometimes strained and invariably well-crafted shifts in manner at “Maverick Kings” and gain pleasure from, as a memorial to Amenhotep has it, “many great monuments, the like of which never existed before since the primeval time of the two lands.”

Maverick Pharaohs and the Egyptian Art of Royal Reinvention

Maverick Pharaohs and the Egyptian Art of Royal Reinvention

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