A giant four-thousand-year-old Egyptian visitor looms over the crowd of live humans milling antlike throughout the vast entry hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is an extraordinary specimen of regal manhood. Carved from a single block of dark gray granodiorite, he sits in a form-fitting kilt on a cubic throne covered by hieroglyphics. He has the broad shoulders, narrow waist and muscular legs of a well-developed athlete. Sporting a headdress of folded striped fabric, he gazes out over the masses with imperturbable self-assurance and open eyes set in a round, youthful face. He is as thrilling as anything in the Met’s great Egyptian collection.
Scholars think this ten-foot tall, almost nine-ton monument originally portrayed the Twelfth-dynasty pharaoh Amenemhat II, who reigned from about 1919 to 1885 B.C. Later artists evidently altered the facial features to make him more like Rameses II, the king who ruled from about 1279 to 1213 B.C. He has belonged to Berlin’s Egyptian Museum since 1837. But the courtyard in Germany where he usually presides is under reconstruction, so he will be a guest of honor in New York for the next ten years.
Ancient Egyptian art has captivated Western imaginations for a long time. It inspired the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the artists and intellectuals of the European Renaissance. In the nineteenth century it caused a veritable epidemic of Egyptomania, which infected Art Deco design in the twentieth century, along with scores of scary movies, from The Mummy of 1932 to The Mummy of 1999.
Amenemhat II feels at once deeply familiar and otherworldly. Its tension between geometric abstraction and organic naturalism, its ambition to transform inert material into something that seems to live and breathe, anticipates the basic aesthetic terms that would define Western art from the Greeks to the start of Modernism. Despite its rigid stillness, the statue has an uncanny animated feeling, as if it were inhabited by some eternal consciousness. That, at least, is what the Egyptians wanted their viewers to experience. For them the pharaoh was truly a divine being.
Around the time Amenemhat II was created, Egyptian artists achieved something close to perfection in sculpture, and the idea of such exacting excellence as something to aim for— in art and in life— must be counted among the Egyptians’ important contributions to human history. Before then, it seems, people just did the best they could. But the trouble with perfection is that it cannot be exceeded, which may explain why Egyptian art changed so little over its five thousand years (and why fascists are so fond of it). For a viewer accustomed to the churn of styles in a world of historical flux, Amenemhat II seems an emissary from a place where time stands still.
A year from now Amenemhat II will be moved into the Met’s Egyptian wing. That should be a good thing. Big as it is, it is dwarfed by the expanse of the Great Hall, and its aura of silent majesty is dampened by the distracting bustle of ordinary mortals. It needs a room of its own to frame its awesomeness properly.
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