- Small sculptures like this have a little magnetism.
- It makes you come close and
- admire and imagine things about it.
- It’s a group of three males
- from about 1340 B.C., the Amarna period. It’s a period famed for naturalism.
- You can see that in the slumped bodies and the gestures.
- The man in the middle has his arm around the
- boy as if he’s drawing him close to him and kind of protecting him,
- and then the two men are holding hands. That’s a very
- beautiful holding of hands, with one man’s clasping the other man’s hand lying flat.
- Every face is different. The man on the left has a rather lined, heavy face, and the corners of his mouth are even drooping.
- And the man in the middle looks more equable and calm.
- And the boy has a little boy’s small mouth. You start saying, “Who were they, and what are their personalities?”
- We actually know these statues were used in domestic contexts,
- in little house shrines, to show devotion to an ancestor, and keep on
- asking for their protection in life. After spending time with it, I think
- that the man in the middle is the person who gives us access into what’s going on.
- The man on his right is probably an esteemed ancestor. He has a fancy wig,
- he has very elaborate
- clothes, and
- a handkerchief that he’s holding. From the side
- you see he has a wide stride.
- On the right, I imagine that is the middle man’s little son.
- And he wants that child to receive the blessings that
- accrue from his attention to the elder. It might have stood in
- the middle man’s house, and then it might have been kept by
- the son’s family. You know, handed down, taking on different identities through time, too.
- That’s a story, but it’s something like that.
- It’s really a fascinating statue that just puts all of these
- questions in your face. You empathize, you want to
- understand it. It reminds me
- of the way we relate to old family snapshots.
- We cherish them, and
- pore over them for some clues to
- draw us close to those people.
SnapshotMarsha Hill
Feature subtitled in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish
Statue of two men and a boy that served as a domestic icon, New Kingdom, Amarna Period, Dynasty 18, reign of Akhenaten, ca. 1353–1336 B.C.
Egypt
Limestone, paint
Rogers Fund, 1911 (11.150.21)
Egypt
Limestone, paint
Rogers Fund, 1911 (11.150.21)
Episode Tags
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