AN EGYPTIAN FAIENCE HORUS, AMULET NEW KINGDOM, DYNASTY XVIII, CIRCA 1353-1336 B.C.

拍品描述

AN EGYPTIAN FAIENCE HORUS AMULET, NEW KINGDOM, DYNASTY XVIII, CIRCA 1353-1336 B.C. Modelled in the round as a falcon seated upon a rectangular integral plinth, the body compact and forward-leaning, the folded wings sheathed against the flanks and terminating in a squared tail that rests flush with the base. The head is turned frontally on a strong neck, the hooked beak pronounced, the eye indicated by a small drilled aperture. A suspension perforation passes laterally through the upper body behind the head, indicating use as an amulet strung and worn. The turquoise-blue glaze is even across the surviving surfaces, with light abrasion and pale tan efflorescence revealing the pale faience body beneath, particularly along the beak, breast, and lower plinth. The falcon form is that of Horus, the sky god and dynastic protector of the Egyptian king, whose eye, the wedjat, was itself the most widely worn of all pharaonic amulets. In its fully sculpted form, as here, the god is present as a compact, alert bird rather than as an abstracted eye, a type worn to invoke his protection upon the living body and, subsequently, upon the mummified one. The frontal turn of the head, distinct from the strict profile seen on many stamped or moulded plaques, gives the small figure an active, watchful character consistent with the amuletic function. The medium is significant. Egyptian faience, a self-glazing quartz-based ceramic, was valued not principally for its economy of production but for its colour: the turquoise and blue-green range that faience achieved under a soda-lime-silica glaze was understood as the colour of regeneration, of the Nile at flood, and of the vegetal cycle. The Egyptian term for the material, tjehenet, carried the sense of that which shines or gleams, associating the object with solar and celestial imagery. A Horus amulet in this glaze thus united form and substance: the sky god rendered in the colour of the sky and of renewal. The proposed dating to the reign of Akhenaten places the amulet in the theologically turbulent late Eighteenth Dynasty, when the traditional pantheon was displaced at court by the exclusive cult of the Aten. Amuletic production of the older gods, including Horus, nevertheless continued at the popular and provincial level throughout this period, and the survival of such pieces attests to the persistence of household devotion alongside official reform. This amulet exemplifies the small-scale faience production of the late Eighteenth Dynasty, in which the traditional falcon iconography of Horus continued to be modelled with confident volume and a saturated turquoise glaze. Its interest lies in the combination of a fully sculpted, three-dimensional falcon type with the intense blue palette characteristic of the Amarna horizon, a period in which such personal amulets carried the older gods forward through a moment of official rupture. Dimensions: Height: 3cm

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