AN EGYPTIAN FAIENCE HEAD OF PTAH, NEW KINGDOM, DYNASTY XVIII, CIRCA 1353-1336 B.C.

拍品描述

AN EGYPTIAN FAIENCE HEAD OF PTAH, NEW KINGDOM, DYNASTY XVIII, CIRCA 1353-1336 B.C. Modelled in the round on a small rectangular tenon, the head presents a mature male face rendered with unusual naturalism. The skull is close-shaven and rounded, the ears set high and projecting, the brow furrowed by three horizontal creases above deeply modelled crow's feet at the outer corners of the narrowed eyes. The cheeks are drawn and lined, the nasolabial folds pronounced, and the thin lips set in a faint asymmetrical smile above a firm chin. The surface is covered in a bright turquoise glaze pooling in the recesses and giving way to buff-toned deposits within the deepest carved lines, which throw the modelling of the face into sharp relief. The frank age-portraiture, the shaven head, and the emphatic rendering of wrinkles and sunken cheeks are hallmarks of a specific current within late Eighteenth Dynasty representation, associated with the Amarna period and its immediate aftermath, when royal and courtly workshops turned briefly from the eternal, idealised faces of earlier tradition toward a more searching, verist manner. Comparable heads in faience and other media have been variously identified as priests, high officials, and, in certain instances, the god Ptah shown in the guise of a bald, aged human, in departure from his more familiar mummiform iconography. The tenon below the neck indicates that the head was made to be set into a separately worked body or into a composite inlay, a technique widely employed in the temple and votive furniture of the period. Faience in pharaonic Egypt was never a simple substitute for stone. Its brilliant blue-green glaze, produced by the reaction of a quartz-based body with copper compounds, evoked the regenerative colours of the Nile, of lapis lazuli and of turquoise, all substances linked to rebirth and to divine flesh. Ptah, patron of craftsmen and demiurge of Memphis, was himself the tutelary deity of the faience workshops, and objects made in this material carried an inherent link to his sphere. The choice of faience for a head of Ptah is therefore not incidental but doubly appropriate, uniting subject and medium in a single theological gesture. The naturalism visible here, the drawn cheeks, the anxious brow, the ageing skin, belongs to a short-lived but consequential episode in Egyptian art in which the human face was permitted, for a moment, to register time. That the sculptor has applied this manner to a divine subject, if the identification as Ptah is accepted, is itself remarkable: the god is shown not in his eternal mummy-wrapping but as a wise, aged human presence, a conception consistent with certain Amarna and post-Amarna theological currents. This head exemplifies the technical accomplishment and iconographic experimentation of late Eighteenth Dynasty faience sculpture at its finest, where the small scale of a composite inlay is used to carry a portrait of unusual psychological weight. Its survival with the glaze substantially intact and the modelling of the face undamaged places it within a narrow group of Amarna-period faience heads in which portraiture and material converge to serve a specifically Egyptian conception of divine and human likeness. Dimensions: Height: 2.5cm

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