King Frederik V's Acquisitions of ancient Sculpture for the Royal Academy of fine Arts in Copenhagen in, The Past in the Present the national museum of denmark (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Past in the Present, 2015
The past is inextricably embedded in the presentwhether we are aware of it or not. The present was shaped by the thoughts and deeds of those who went before, and our daily life largely plays out on a stage set by our ancestors.
… , Nation-Building and Change. NaMu IV, …, 2008
MA Dissertation, University of Manchester, 2023
The approach to ancient Egyptian statuary is often focused on individual examples, typological studies, or art historical considerations, admittedly hindered by the lack of evidence inherent to looted antiquities. In contrast, statues from the New Kingdom artists’ village of Deir el-Medina come with an exceptionally rich archaeological context, and yet, its globally dispersed corpus has not been consolidated, let alone analysed as a whole. This pilot study focus on museum statues representing private individuals from the village, complete and from secured or probable provenance, to advance the understanding of the private statuary practice in Deir el-Medina’s environment by regrouping and recontextualising the artefacts. It demonstrates how fruitful a holistic contextual approach—examining archaeological, visual, and textual evidence beyond the analysis of the corpus—is to reveal what three-dimensional representations the artisans desired for themselves, how they conceptualised, produced, and used them, and why they did so: What? The constituted corpus of 41 statues reveals extraordinary variety and creativity in rapidly evolving types, monuments of all sizes realised in dominantly local materials, techniques and styles emphasised by a rather conventional iconography, and remarkably multifaceted inscriptions. How? As artists, the villagers conceptualised statues holistically, and if they did not realise the monuments themselves, they chose colleagues for their particular craft, and sometimes family relations, to produce artworks which could be exchanged in economic transactions and used in various, increasingly public, thought-out settings. Why? The artists designed statues not only for their religious effect, but also for social affirmation, artistic positioning among peers. They innovated, because they could—and wanted others to know, in their time and in the future. If the results underline how particular statue conceptualisation among artists may have been, they also provide insights into commission, production, transaction, use, and reuse which should be transferable to other statues and sites.
CLARA
Small funerary statuettes shaped as mummiform figurines are among the most common ancient Egyptian artefacts to be found in museums of cultural history worldwide. The Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo (MCH) is no exception. The present article explores the biographies of material culture, materiality, objectification and shifts in meaning. It probes the many ways small artefacts, often categorized as ‘minor art objects’ of no importance, provide us with valuable insights into ancient Egyptian beliefs, society and culture. Selecting a few pieces from different periods, it delves into the multi-layered narratives and intersecting storylines where the objects’ biographies are tied to a web of relations across time and space as well as to the history of the ancient Egyptian collection at the MCH. The article discusses questions related to museological and heritage management, and addresses ethical issues concerning the provenance and ownership of archaeological artefacts i...