Tipificación de los SNPs

ome of us prize William Kelly Simpson most for his scholar-ship. What I have treasured in Kelly is his “eye.” It is the eye of a true connoisseur of art—all periods of art. He brings to Egyptology and to the study of Egyptian art a rare understanding of what it takes to make a work of art and an appreciation of the process. A walk through any art gallery or museum with Kelly Simpson is an eye-opening event.

This paper, centering on the identification of a recut statue in the Vatican museum, is a small token of thanks to Kelly for the many times over the years—be it in Boston, in Cairo, or in Beaubourg—that he has gently opened my eyes to details, surfaces, and fine points I would have missed without him.

In the past two or three decades Egyptologists have become more and more aware of the frequency with which pharaohs—some more than others—reused their predecessors’ statuary and had it recut in their own likenesses. This should not be surprising. After all, the Egyptian kings reused their predecessors’ temples, adding a courtyard with pylon here, a processional way with columns there. The only procedural differ-ence between remodeling a temple and revamping a statue is that the former process was additive—parts were added on—while the latter was reductive—parts were carved away. Both required new cartouches to be added, sometimes over old ones.

Hourig Sourouzian, Christine Strauss-Seeber, Claude Vandersleyen and others have unmasked portrait after portrait, often Ramesside ones, for having started out their ancient lives as images of much earlier kings.

For the most part, their methodologies have concentrated on the fact that in each period, and to a certain extent in each reign, sculptors devised unique forms for anatomical details. For example, a Dynasty 4 kneecap does not look like a Dynasty 12 kneecap which does not resem-ble a Dynasty 18 kneecap. Parsing a statue’s physique and focusing on its anatomical features allowed each scholar to recognize anatomical details that were foreign to the period. Correctly redating these details—

often several for each statue—allowed each scholar to identify the

S

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individual for whom or at least the time period during which the statue was first carved.

While this is a valid approach, it deals with only part of the subject.

What must also be considered in any discussion of recutting is how the transformation was actually accomplished—the steps the recarver fol-lowed to change the old image to a new one. It is easy to understand how a heavier image was transformed into a slimmer one by simply remov-ing the excess stone. Makremov-ing a thinner image appear fatter is more complicated, however, since stone can not be added onto the outside like so much clay. But a statue can be made to appear greater in one direction or another by reducing the length of the perpendicular axis.

Understanding this process will allow many more examples of recutting to be detected in the future.

One example is the Louvre’s large granodiorite seated statue of Ramesses II (A20), which was originally a statue of Amenhotep III.¹ It was easy to translate Amenhotep III’s fleshier upper torso to Ramesses the Great’s more athletic build by simply carving off some of the excess flesh. However, transforming the earlier king’s narrower face to the later king’s broader one required some very deft plastic surgery. The recarver accomplished this by erasing Amenhotep’s nemes browband and creat-ing a new one lower on the forehead, thereby shortencreat-ing the vertical length of the face and making the lateral axis appear wider.

The surface of the statue tells the story. The original sculptor and the recarver worked under different circumstances—the first in the quarry on a fresh piece of stone and the second on a surface made hard and brittle from centuries’ exposure to the elements. Therefore, the marks left by the recarver differ from the original cuts. Usually the later marks are coarser and broader. The surface polish of the original features often differs from the surface polish of the recarved parts. Sometimes the later surface appears rougher than the earlier one, although sometimes the reverse is true and a new polish has been given to the entire surface of the statue to make it appear uniform.

1 Arielle P. Kozloff and Betsy M. Bryan, Egypt’s Dazzling Sun: Amenhotep III and His World (Cleveland, 1992), pp. 172–75, no. 14. In Miguel Angel Corzo, Nefertari, Luce d’Egitto (Rome, 1994), pp. 146–49, no. 21, Christophe Barbotin accepted all of the points of recutting that I identified in 1992, however, he claimed that the statue was originally Ramesses II and that Ramesses recut his own statue. That is highly unlikely, however, since there is no other lifesize granodiorite seated statue of Ramesses II wearing the nemes. On the other hand, there is an entire series of such statues for Amenhotep III (see Kozloff and Bryan, Egypt’s Dazzling Sun, p. 462), and the Louvre statue was undoubtedly one of that Dynasty 18 series before it was removed and recut for Ramesses in Dynasty 19.

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Ghosts of earlier features are often apparent under close examina-tion of the surface. Most of the recut statues are quite large and the average ancient viewer would never have come close enough to discern the traces of earlier kohl lines or eyebrows, for example. Therefore, the offending details had to be erased only enough so that they would not be seen from the usual viewing distance. All of these phenomena were present on the Louvre statue. The surface was true to form for Ramesses II being matte or even rough² in the areas that had been abrad-ed away or recut while still retaining the high polish characteristic of Amenhotep III statuary in the un-recut areas.

What strikes the eye immediately on viewing the Vatican’s overlife-size statue of a queen, attributed by its inscription to Ramesses II’s mother Tuya (inv. no. 22),³ is its surface polish which is unusually high for any period of Egyptian art (figs. 1–3). It is typical, however, of the work of some eighteenth and nineteenth century sculpture restorers who hoped that a gleaming surface would distract the viewer from noticing the restorations. Tuya’s restorer was trying to distract us from the fact that her lower legs are restored with those from a second statue, also in granodiorite, but of a slightly lighter color and with many more inclusions than in the upper part. The join was achieved after smoothing down the breaks on both pieces, the resulting unnatural straight line being most visible in the left side view (fig. 2). We will return to that subject later.

The fact that some reworking had occurred prompts the viewer to search for other clues of a similar nature. One of these (though visible only below the proper right breast and partially hidden behind the raised left hand) was the presence of fat folds over the rib cage. These were a feature of queens’ statuary from the reign of Amenhotep III, like those standing beside him on the colossi of Memnon and like the fleshiness of his own sculpted torsos as noted above. But fat folds are absent from stone portraits of Ramesses the Great’s queens as they are from his own.

Thus, the presence of fat folds on the Vatican statue opens up the possi-bility that it could have been carved in Dynasty 18, presumably during the reign of Amenhotep III, when flesh was in vogue. The next step is to study the surface for alterations.

The Vatican queen wears a combination of coiffure and crown invented for Queen Tiy’s imagery and best known from the statuettes in

2 Turin’s seated statue of Ramesses wearing the blue crown is one of the few exceptions to this rule. There the surface has a satin finish, but is not highly polished.

3 Giuseppe Botti and Pietro Romanelli, Le sculture del Museo Gregoriano egizio (Vatican City, 1951), pp. 18–21, no. 28. H. including modern (eighteenth century?) base: 3 meters.

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Figs. 1–2. Statue of Tuya, mother of Ramesses II, recut from a statue of Queen Tiy, wife of Amenhotep III, restored probably in the eighteenth century.

Granodiorite, h. 3.00 meters including base. Museo Gregoriano egizio, inv. no. 22.

Photographs by John Ross.

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Fig. 3. Detail of the statue of Tuya.

Photograph by John Ross.

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glazed steatite (fig. 4) and Egyptian blue in Paris, Cairo, and London, a gilded wood appliqué in Munich, the colossal limestone group from Medinet Habu now in Cairo and the “colossi of Memnon” still at Kom el-Heitan.⁴ It consists of a heavy wig of dozens of tresses that terminate in long twisted ends and completely shroud the shoulders. On top of this lies a vulture headdress with its fanned-out wings framing the queen’s face. On top of this is a floral wreath, and above this is a tall modius which on a large figure can be faceted with cartouches or on a small stat-uette is merely striated vertically.

Ramesses II’s queen Nefertari, whose images are far more numerous than Tuya’s and therefore give a better representation of the styles of her period, also wears a simplified version of this coiffure and headdress, but without the wreath and with other important differences. First, Nefer-tari’s coiffure itself rarely shrouds the shoulders, but usually divides with one group of tresses falling in front of the shoulders and the others behind. Second, Nefertari’s hair length characteristically extends below her bustline instead of above as here. Queen Tiy’s hair length always allowed her breasts to be exposed, and her nipples, as were those of many of the goddess statues made during her husband’s reign, were almost always covered by a rosette motif. Nefertari never used this device.

Furthermore, it was characteristic of Queen Tiy to wear a broad collar of a length equal to her hair length. Nefertari’s hair was always significant-ly longer than her collar.

The tooling of the wig and vulture is remarkably delicate. Each line appears to have been achieved in a single, swift cut although it must have taken a series of tiny taps with hammer and chisel. The flat planes on the face of each feather and the undulating surface of each tress are polished to a satin finish. The quality of the workmanship is true of the highest level of Egyptian mastery in granodiorite and cannot be claimed for any one period in particular. However, when this high quality of carving appears on a sculpture, it occurs consistently on every part of the statue where fine details are required. Therefore, on this statue, one would expect to find the same delicate tooling also on the necklace, the bracelets, and the floral wreath. However, it becomes clear as we travel back and forth along the statue that the toolmarks indicating the tresses, the twisted ends, and the vulture feathers are the only details on this statue of such delicacy. The necklace, the bracelets, and the wreath, for

4 Kozloff and Bryan, Egypt’s Dazzling Sun, pp. 202–203, no. 22, and figures 22a, 22b (Paris, Cairo, and London statuettes); pp. 212–13, no. 28 (Munich appliqué); p. 42, figure II.5 (Medinet Habu group), p. 33, figure II.1 (Kom el-Heitan group).

Fig. 4. Figure of Queen Tiy (fragment of a group). Glazed steatite, h. 30.5 cm. Louvre N 2312. Photograph by author.

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example, are all described rather broadly with rough, wide interstices between elements.

Examination of the top of the floral wreath reveals the reason for this. In the front center, where a vulture neck and head once protruded before they broke off, the wig and wreath rise about 2 cm higher than on the rest of the circumference, obviously because the rest had been cut down making the modius taller. It was easier to rework the top of the floral wreath than to create a new design more typical of a Ramesside queen.

The only practical reason for cutting away part of the top of the head is to allow more room on the face of the modius. The only reason for more room is to replace rather short cartouches like Amenhotep III’s with rather long ones like Ramesses II’s. The workmanship of the car-touches and the uraei, with which they alternate, is similar to the broad, heavy treatment of the bracelets, the necklace, and the floral wreath;

and it is distinctly different from the wig and the vulture wings.

Where else does the heavier toolwork appear on this statue? There are two cuts in particular that equal the heavy-handed work on the modius, etc. These are the wrinkle on the neck and the widened space between the upper and lower lips. As on Louvre A 20 when it was altered, these features have been added to conform with Ramesside style. The neck line is a standard Ramesses II feature. And the space between the lips had to be widened to trim down Tiy’s thicker upper lip (like Amenhotep’s) to the more narrow form of a Ramesside queen. The labial folds on either side of her mouth were also rather coarsely indent-ed like Louvre A 20’s to create the chubby-cheekindent-ed Ramesside face.

The eyes were also revised. What would have started out as Tiy’s dramatic eyebrows and kohl lines were shaved down so that neither is visible—although traces are palpable to the touch—except for the part of the kohl line that was more deeply undercut to create a heavy Rames-side upper eyelid, like that on the Turin Ramesses.

Some major work was done to the shape of the face before these individual features were revised. First of all the entire face was slimmed down from its original full-moon shape, by cutting away the sides from the temple down to the jaw line. A dead space of up to a centimeter wide frames the face where wig and headdress were cut away. The interior line of the wig, which is straight up and down on every untouched por-trait, now forms a keyhole shape.

That the face was cut down is in keeping with what happened to the rest of the figure especially from the hips down. The clue is the space between the pendant right forearm and the body, where there should be

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no space. The forearm should lie directly against the body and the space between the hand and the thigh should be either nonexistent or mini-mal, whereas here it is quite wide. If the bent left elbow seems to poke out unusually far to the side, this, too, is caused by the slimming down of the hips and thighs on that side.

As the statue now stands, the breadth of the breasts is about equal to the breadth of the hips, which is consistent for Dynasty 19 standards.

If one could replace enough stone to fill in the gap between the present hips and the pendant right arm and replace an equal amount on the left side (thereby making the left arm more comfortably arranged), then the statue’s proportions would be in keeping with Queen Tiy’s proportions wherein the hips are usually one-half to one whole grid square wider than the Dynasty 19 versions.⁵

The pose, the rosettes on the breasts, the combination of heavy wig, vulture headdress, floral wreath, and modius, the scaled-down propor-tions, the recutting of face, modius, and jewelry all point to this statue inscribed for Ramesses II’s mother as having started out as a statue of Amenhotep III’s great Queen Tiy.

One question that has not been satisfactorily answered above con-cerns the date at which the foreign set of lower legs was attached. Per-haps the answer is suggested by the style in which the little figure of the prince Henutmire is carved on the left side of the back pillar, a space that must have been left blank by Tiy. He is rendered in two halves. The join between the upper part of the statue and the new lower legs runs through the prince’s waist and just below his bent elbow. Any connois-seur of Egyptian art would recognize the upper half’s slim proportions, the elongated arms and the long, lazy s-curve of the prince’s sidelock as archetypically Ramesside in style.

However, the figure below the waist, that is, from the cleanly dressed, slowly curving join down, bears no resemblance to any tradi-tional Egyptian style of any dynasty. While Egyptian kings and princes wore kilts, this boy’s outfit is a strange sort of mini-skirt unknown in ancient Egypt. Furthermore, the prince’s legs should have the same long, thin look of his arms, but instead they have the firm muscles and jaunty active bend to them that one would expect in classical or post-Renaissance art. The lower half of the prince’s figure must have been added by a thoroughly skilled stonecutter who knew that Egyptian males wore short skirts and that they were posed in two-dimensional

5 See Betsy Bryan’s grid chart in Kozloff and Bryan, Egypt’s Dazzling Sun, p. 466, table 3.

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b

representation with one foot in front of the other, but did not understand the fine points of Egyptian art well enough to recreate a good facsimile.

Perhaps it was done in the eighteenth century by the likes of a Cavaceppi or some other gifted restorer of ancient classical marbles.⁶ Perhaps it was then, too, that some of the other repairs were made to this statue such as the nose, the knuckles on the left hand and the attach-ment to a new base. Some of Cavaceppi’s distinguishing traits included

“joins with cleanly dressed, slowly curving edges that are meant to look like accidental breaks; setting the remnants of an ancient plinth into a modern base …. To further mask that a piece is repaired, the entire sur-face of the [sculpture]… may be reworked, producing a homogeneous texture … highly polished surfaces are characteristic of Cavaceppi’s ear-ly restorations.”⁷ This evidence is not enough to attribute the restora-tion to Cavaceppi himself, but at least it gives us a period to which the types of repairs we see on the Vatican queen could reasonably belong, and it would explain the classical flavor of Henutmire’s skirt and legs.

“joins with cleanly dressed, slowly curving edges that are meant to look like accidental breaks; setting the remnants of an ancient plinth into a modern base …. To further mask that a piece is repaired, the entire sur-face of the [sculpture]… may be reworked, producing a homogeneous texture … highly polished surfaces are characteristic of Cavaceppi’s ear-ly restorations.”⁷ This evidence is not enough to attribute the restora-tion to Cavaceppi himself, but at least it gives us a period to which the types of repairs we see on the Vatican queen could reasonably belong, and it would explain the classical flavor of Henutmire’s skirt and legs.