The objects will be on view at the Getty Villa Museum from January 24, 2024, through January 25, 2027, thanks to a generous long-term loan from the British Museum, London.
“Ancient Egyptian art has long been celebrated for its remarkable consistency of style, format, and subjects, aspects of which were widely emulated and adapted by neighboring cultures,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the Getty Museum. “In fact, however, Egyptian art continued to evolve and change over the 3,000 years of its pharaonic history. This included a number of episodes which drew on types and styles from earlier periods back to the Old and Middle Kingdoms before 2000 BCE. The Saite Period was the last, and in many ways the most pervasive, of these revivals in which Egyptian artists copied and adapted earlier sculptures in an archaizing celebration of their forebears.”
Works in this exhibition portray priests and administrative officials of the Saite Dynasty. Portrait statues, often of highly polished dark stone, as well as sculpted reliefs, figurines, and anthropoid sarcophagi, served several purposes. Some were commissioned for temples, allowing the subject to eternally worship the gods and receive their blessings. Others were deposited in tombs, functioning as vessels that could be inhabited by the deceased’s spirit.
The 26th Dynasty was a time of intense artistic revival. Sculptors looked to the past for inspiration, employing styles and compositions from much earlier periods back to Egypt’s Old Kingdom. It was also the last phase of native rule before Egypt was conquered by the Persians—and then later by the Greeks and the Romans. Despite these shifting political circumstances, many of the dynasty’s sculptural trends persisted for centuries.
“The sculptures on display fall into a category traditionally called ‘private portraits,’ meaning that they represent non-royal historical individuals. The 26th Dynasty was a period in which private portraiture flourished, as the people who made up the dynasty’s complex administration commissioned temple statues and tomb furnishings that express their identity and reflect the prosperity of the era,” says Sara E. Cole, assistant curator of antiquities at the Getty Villa Museum. “We hope that visitors will come away from the exhibition with an expanded idea of what makes a ‘portrait’ as well as an appreciation for Late Period Egyptian art.”
This exhibition’s gallery—part of the Getty Museum’s program The Classical World in Context—is devoted to the diverse cultures that interacted with, and influenced, the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Egyptian portraits on view, such as the Statue of Nakhthorheb and the Statue of Amenhotep, date back to the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, contemporary with the Archaic period in Greece.
In addition, representations in carved relief on stelae and funerary objects, such as two ushabtis belonging to men named Ankhhap and Pakhaas, complement the statues.
Sculpted Portraits from Ancient Egypt is curated by Sara E. Cole, assistant curator of antiquities at the Getty Villa Museum.