Power and Some Glory

By A.T. Baker

Hieratic, square-shouldered, level-eyed, they seemed as impressive and impassive--and as remote--as the pyramids they built. This was the image of Egypt's pharaohs, bodied forth in stone by the royal sculptors, for some 1,500 years. Then, in 1378 B.C., began the reign of Amenhotep IV. For a time so remote in history, the records are understandably imprecise. But it seems clear that in his 17-year rule, Amenhotep IV changed the style and direction of its art.

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of its founding, the Brooklyn Museum has assembled a rare collection of objects from Amenhotep's reign, largely through the efforts of Curator Bernard V. Bothmer, who has spent three years negotiating the loans. Some 200 in all, the objects range from beautifully incised bas-reliefs of domestic life to sensitively molded small heads of princesses, high officials and the merely young.

Perhaps Amenhotep was one of the first student radicals. At any rate, he succeeded to the throne at about 16 and set out to revolutionize the age-old system of multiple deities, substituting a single god, Aten, symbolized by the sun. In fact, he changed his own name to Akhenaten, meaning Useful to Aten. Women's Lib would have loved him: he gave equal billing, in bas-relief and statuary, to his Queen, Nefertiti. She was portrayed in the sleek drapery she might actually have worn, one shoulder bare, a clasp under her right breast. In dark red quartz, the Queen's torso, on loan from the Louvre, is one of the beauties of the exhibition.

Akhenaten himself had a pot belly, epicene limbs and a receding forehead, and he had himself portrayed that way.

With such an example of candor, the portraitists of lesser dignitaries seem to have really looked at their sitters, producing heads that represent real people with individuality rather than conventional images. Even the royal family was portrayed in familiar situations -- kissing, hugging or dandling a child. Nefertiti's striking facial resemblance to her husband, however, is thought by some scholars to be the result of artistic license, a concession to the kingly features considered ideal at the time.

As a founder of a new religion, Akhenaten needed a new capital for his god, and he found it at Tell el Amarna, a scoop in the hills along the Nile halfway between Memphis and Thebes. There, with an authority today's modern planners can only envy, Akhenaten laid out and had built a whole city. But when he died, the traditionalists took over and tore the whole place down. Thus there are few surviving works of monumental size, but the smaller objects, dug out of the rubble of Tell el Amarna and now on exhibition in Brooklyn, testify dramatically to the marked change in style and approach that the young Sun King instigated. It was a new particularity -- a King with a paunch, a courtier with a sullen mouth, a sensuous Queen. Even the beasts of the field were liberated from the frozen rhythmic frieze of an earlier time. The result was an art vivid as yesterday, eternal as tomorrow.

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