Philip Dawes Fine Art Gallery

Gallery Eleven - Artisan - 1

Nefertiti

The original bust of Queen Nefertiti housed at the Berlin Museum,
Germany. Note the famous missing left eye.

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Commission

Numbered copies were made by the Berlin Museum from the above original. The copies were strictly limited and were, naturally, poor imitations of the original. The artist's client purchased two of these copies. She was a collector Egyptian antiquities, including a sarcophagus.

Whereas the original was sculpted in limestone, and painted using glass frit colours, the copies were cast in plaster of Paris, and painted with modern water colours. The painting quality was inferior compared to the original. This was proven to the artist, after he obtained a large colour poster of the original from the Berlin Museum.

The artist's client gave him a numbered bust copy, with the request that he: "restore it to what he believed the original looked like, save for the damaged ears and the missing serpent on the crown, and what would have been the real jewel necklace."

The following series of pictures were taken by the artist at different stages as he executed the work. A photograph of the original copy was unfortunately overlooked.

The first operation was cleaning the surface smooth and removing all traces of colour. This was done using damp swabs. Next was the delicate process of applying gesso as the basis for painting and the foundation for gold leaf. Then followed preparation of the gesso, the cutting of it, which is a long procedure to completion. The surface becomes smooth like polished marble. Applying the yellow and then the red bole and polishing it, as the foundation for gilding, was followed by three layers of double weight gold leaf and finally burnishing. Painting the flesh using fine watercolour paints and all other parts completed that stage.

However, before those preparations, was the task of making two glass eyes. I purchased water-clear rock crystal and made various tools to shape and polish the two eye balls. This was perhaps the trickiest of all the work, as I had never before worked with minerals. In retrospect, this exercise was a prelude to my cutting, polishing and faceting gemstones ten years later.

The eyeballs, having been formed and polished, were put aside for insertion into their sockets after completion of all other work.

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The text below was extracted from the website: http://www.sherryart.com/newstory/nefertiti.html
It failed to produce connections regarding copyright"

Nefertiti's Eye
by Jagdish S. Mann

"For more than thirty centuries, Akhenaten and Nefertiti remained unrecorded in history, forgotten even in legend. Their names were chiseled off the monuments; their faces were defaced from the statues; their city was razed to the ground, its very bricks stolen and carried off. Then, slowly, with the increasing successes in deciphering of heiroglyphic and cuneiform writing, a faint whispers of a king (either a gentle prophet or a cruel criminal) and a queen (too beautiful to describe) began to appear.

Defacers' chisels were not able to disfigure everything. The border stele in the remote areas had survived the destructive fury, and the clay-tablet letters written to foreign capitals had also escaped the censor's attention. Archaeologists began to read these dispersed messages and fill in the empty spaces on the monuments in Thebes and Karnak.

By 1900, a picture had emerged of a pharaoh who was courageous or crazy enough to buck one of the most enduring and entrenched of the establishments. He defied the priests of Amun. He started a new ethic-based monotheistic religion, and erected a beautiful city 300 miles north of Thebes.

The reaction to this rebellion was swift and complete. Within a few years of his death, nothing remained of his religion or of his city. Even his name and that of his queen were obliterated from the memory of men.

But only for a time. Today, Akhenaten is considered to be one of the most remarkable personalities, a man ahead of his time. All major modern religions are essentially ethic-based and monotheistic. But what about his queen? Was she as beautiful as the epithets proclaimed? Did she share his vision?

The answer to the first part came with the discovery of the bust of Nefertiti, unearthed near the modern city of Tell el-Amarna, by a team of archaeologists working for the German Orient Society under Professor Ludwig Borchardt of Berlin. They were allowed by the Egyptian Government to excavate the site of Akhenaten's short lived capital, Akhetaten.

The first person to lay eyes on Nefertiti's face in 3300 years was Mohammed Ahmes Es-Senussi. On December 6, 1912, he was digging in room 19 grid P_47 (the area was divided in grids measuring 600 square feet) when the rays of the sun lit up the gold and blue colors of the queen's necklace.

A shout from Mohammed brought all picks and shovels in the area to a stand-still. Professor Borchardt was sent for from his make-shift hut where he slumbered, on a canvas cot, after his mid-day meal. The statuette lay buried, head down, in the debris. Once uncovered, the sand-stone figurine stood twenty inches tall, and was in near perfect condition. The only visible damage was the chipped ear-lobes, and the in-lay of the retina of the left eye was missing.

As to the beauty of Nefertiti: it is timeless. Her face has become the best known in history, and her bust, which the German team smuggled out of Egypt to Berlin disguised as broken pieces of pottery, is the most copied and admired in the world.

The sand and dirt of room 19 (more than 30 cubic feet) was sifted again and again through a finer and finer mesh. All the ear pieces were found but the eye in-lay was never recovered. Only later, a closer examination revealed that it was never inserted.

Many theories, some likely and others far-fetched, have been advanced to explain this deliberate flaw in the masterpiece. It was suggested, for example, that the artist was interrupted at his work and left the work-shop with the in-lay in his possession, never to return. Or that the artist had fallen in love with the queen as she posed for him, was jilted by her, and in impotent revenge, refused to complete his masterwork. This is not as far-fetched as it first seems. The queen was known to be flirtatious. Another theory was that Nefertiti had gone blind in one eye. The artist had simply opted for realism over pharoanic dignity. Prevalence of eye disease in ancient Egypt was pointed to as well as the uniquely independent style of the artist. The graceful curve of the long neck, the arched eye-brow, and the hint of a smile on the queen's sensual full lips is a far cry from the symmetrical frozen immobility of the traditional Egyptian statuary.

This view too had to be abandoned, however, when new wall reliefs and other three dimensional figures were found. Some of these were clearly by the same hand that had carved the famous bust, and show the queen, some at an older age, with both perfectly good eyes. No satisfactory consensus has been reached to explain this archaeological mystery.

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	The image to the left shows a computer reconstruction of what is believed to be the face of Queen Nefertiti (1380-1362 BC) of the 18th dynasty Egypt. If it was not meant to be serious it would be laughable! The image bears absolutely no resemblance to that of Nefertiti. It is more of an idealised version from the mind of the computer operator. The eyebrows are wrong. The eyes are wrong. The shape of the face is wrong. The chin is wrong. The lips are wrong. And even the headdress is wrong, and by the looks of it the earrings are wrong!
The photos to the right are of the original bust of Nefertiti, housed in the Berlin Museum, Germany. Note in the statement of the original finder of the bust: "...he was digging... ... when the rays of the sun lit up the gold and blue colors of the queen's necklace." It is the assertion of the writer that the bust was originally completed with the gold and jewel refinements, including the missing left eye.

Nefertiti's Eye by Jagdish S. Mann

Nefertiti's Eye
by Jagdish S. Mann