AN EGYPTIAN FAIENCE AMULET OF A STANDING FEMALE ATTENDANT, NEW KINGDOM, DYNASTY XVIII, CIRCA 1353-13

拍品描述

AN EGYPTIAN FAIENCE AMULET OF A STANDING FEMALE ATTENDANT, NEW KINGDOM, DYNASTY XVIII, CIRCA 1353-1336 B.C. Modelled in the round and standing frontally upon a small rectangular plinth, the figure represents a nude young woman with arms held close to the body, the hands resting against the thighs. The head is disproportionately large in relation to the slender torso, closely shaven and rendered smooth save for the prominent, projecting ears. The features are softly modelled, with heavy-lidded almond eyes, a broad nose, and full lips drawn into a faint smile. The breasts are small and high-set, the waist narrow, the hips indicated only by the swelling curve of a low-slung girdle that dips to a point at the pubic triangle. Incised linear ornament describes a beaded or cord girdle passing across the hips and framing the lower abdomen, with further vertical striations descending along the legs suggesting an open, diaphanous garment or leg ornament. The feet are summarily indicated at the front edge of the base. The turquoise-blue glaze is even and lustrous, with light earthen encrustation retained in the recesses, and fine crazing visible across the surface. The figure belongs to the well-established New Kingdom type of the nude young female attendant, often identified as a concubine, servant girl, or musician figure, whose iconography combined ideals of youth, fertility, and rejuvenation. The shaven head with prominent ears and the low-slung hip girdle are characteristic markers of this type, associated with attendants depicted in tomb painting and in the round as bearers of cosmetic vessels, mirror handles, and offering trays. Such figures were placed in tombs and shrines as agents of regeneration for the deceased, their nudity and youthful proportions signalling the promise of rebirth rather than eroticism in the modern sense. The medium itself carries meaning. Egyptian faience, a self-glazing quartz-based ceramic, was known in antiquity as tjehnet, meaning "that which is brilliant" or "shining," and its characteristic turquoise-blue colour was associated with the waters of the Nile, with fertility, and with regeneration through the goddess Hathor. The choice of faience for a figure of this iconographic type is therefore consistent: the medium's symbolic register reinforces the subject. Objects of comparable format and glaze quality are typical of the elite workshops of the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty, when faience production reached a technical peak and colour ranges expanded under royal patronage at sites such as Amarna and Malqata. The stylistic features of the present figure, including the softly rounded facial modelling, the emphatic ears, the slender elongated proportions, and the low pointed girdle, are consistent with production during the later Eighteenth Dynasty and specifically with the artistic idiom of the Amarna period, to which the supplied dating of circa 1353-1336 B.C. corresponds. This amulet exemplifies the intersection of funerary function and courtly aesthetic in the small-scale faience production of the later Eighteenth Dynasty, where the female attendant figure was refined into a distinctive type combining symbolic nudity, youthful proportion, and the regenerative colour of tjehnet. It stands within the small group of Amarna-period faience figurines in which the technical brilliance of the medium and the elongated, mannered idiom of the period are brought together in a single devotional object. Dimensions: Height: 7cm

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