21/08/2024
was absent. conceived and voiced. designed and calculated, drawn and approved. selected and measured, cut out and straightened, plastered and polished. outlined and decorated, carved and painted. laid to rest and forgotten. fulfilled.
a defenseless structure left to rot, the Abode of Permanence, the tomb-memorial of Nefertari (QV66) escaped the fate of being mutilated by an savage, like other burials in the necropolis of the royal wives. a slave of illusion, who lived in the dirt and ate garbage, was not able to contemplate and create, and therefore desecrated the pure creations of civilization. he sees only what his primitive mind wants to see, for to open his eyes to the truth means to question everything he believes. The world for him is simply divided into two opposites, while the basis is in balance in the middle. everything that is alien to him and, most importantly, incomprehensible is an a priori evil that must be humiliated and destroyed. Thus, a superstitious nonentity found its purpose and justification for its existence in the destruction of the heritage of the past, not realizing that there were the roots of its tradition.
the enlightened age turned the tombs into an amusement park and a quarry to fill museums with curiosities, where they exhibited mummified corpses as exhibits, and tourists filled the interior of ancient burials and the cracked bones of ancient temples. a senseless crowd always brings death to the monument. The restorers did not disappoint either. in the mid-1900s, all the painted reliefs of Nefertari were 'added': crumbling places and cracks were covered with mortar. and, in order not to spoil the visitor’s heightened sense of beauty, it was decided to obligingly paint the missing places with modern paint. sometimes directly on the ancient pigment. G. Carter did a similar thing when he corrected the painting of the burial chamber of TutankhAMON and with a brush imitated the texture of fungal stains in areas of the fresco where it had not spread. over 6 years of restoration work in the tomb, carried out by the Getty Research Institute, 1986-1992, it was possible to clear the painted reliefs from renovation. but, alas, not everything. When comparing the current state with the digitized glass negatives of the Turin Museum, it is clearly visible that most of the glyphs, contours, and profiles have been adjusted for some reason. in some places, the background color, which in some places was also applied in a new way, covered the flaws of the ancient artist: a brush stroke going beyond the contour, drops of paint. uneven lines are smoothed out.
in the images of the narrative belt of the southern and eastern walls of the adjacent chamber D, which is partially reconstructed here, a modern brush touched half of the glyphs, the shape of the blue wig of HATHOR was changed, and many minor corrections. some figures were straightened in ancient times with a white border, hiding negligence and blots, because the master did not work everywhere. the neat, confident and thin line of Nefertari’s profiles contrasts with the sloppy, uneven and confused contours of the Neters next to her, differently executed eyes, the original relief emerging from under the painting, spades beyond the contour - all these are signs of haste in the decorating process. changing the image during the work, hiding the original stage behind the piece and painting - a typical technique for high-speed construction and conveyor design of the era of the ambitious reign of Ramses II. quality has given way to speed. when the paint crumbled and the plaster fell out of the reliefs, overlapping glyphs appeared in the light, which vaguely reminds the select initiates of the outlines of a helicopter, a tank and a UFO. repeatedly changed and supplemented figures of the king were revealed, in which some see the figure of Neter standing behind him. Many examples of the revealed overlay of images on top of each other are found in the temples of Ramses II in Abu Simbel, Seti I in Abydos, Ramses III in Medinet Abu, Luxor and Karnak.
ancient photographs captured all the little things that make up the whole, and which is not paid attention to by those who look at the image as a spot of color, and not as a mosaic of many self-sufficient and interrelated objects. unnoticeable small corrections accumulate successively, gradually replacing the original. without allowing the ancient monument to crumble, it is imperceptibly made modern. Before it's too late, the ancient walls should be melted into transparent polycarbonate, glass or something similar, the tomb itself should be sealed, and an exact 3D copy made in the ground for the crowd. As the example of the relocated cameras at the Saqqara Mayan memorial shows, they will still not notice the difference, since they will be too busy taking selfies hugging the tomb keeper against the backdrop of the ancient walls. It doesn’t matter if the next Belzoni or Vasyan scratches his name on the wall or chips off the paint, just replace the damaged segment with a duplicate. It’s not scary if esotericists calling on the gods of antiquity start ritualizing there, just ventilate the room. it doesn’t matter that someone can disturb the atmosphere of the tomb: firstly, this is a copy, secondly, it has already fulfilled its purpose, and, thirdly, most people still don’t understand what is depicted at all. ignorance is bliss. the images themselves are just pretty pictures as they are not 'open' as they should be.
Not everything is going smoothly with copies either. With great roar, the exhibition of TutankhAMON's gold - low-grade replicas of many artifacts from his tomb - swept across the world, replacing the originals. On the centenary of the discovery of the tomb by Carter, all the posters in Egypt showed not the magnificent mask of TutankhAMON, but its dull copy with a dreamy upward gaze and a pursed lower eyelid. Now this inept craft is increasingly replacing the original in the media, it has already leaked into science-fiction films, flew into magazines and even fit into the cover and pages of Egyptological books. replacement of everything and everywhere.
Museum showcases are filled with Egyptian artifacts that have been repainted and sculpted in our time. Museum workers do not notice the inconvenient fact that this is no longer really Egypt, like a beautiful palace in an era of bad taste, which was covered with air conditioners and the facade was painted pink. If the Roman grotesque restorations of sculpture and relief immediately catch the eye, then the European ones are done more carefully and are not so noticeable. brought up on ancient art will not be able to adequately reproduce Egyptian art. the measured art of constancy or the art of movement, a moment imprinted in stone. Women's sculptures in museums, where eyes and lips are widely painted on, have received the most damage. when the women ran out, the merciless restorer remade the faces of the male portraits to his taste, adjusted the sarcophagi and colored the delicate Sakkar reliefs with acid colors. The apotheosis of inept restoration is the beautiful head (Field Museum) of a female statue of the Refined Era, post-Amarna, mutated into something floated like oil in the sun, mockingly nicknamed 'Michael Jackson's head'. Sometimes the best a museum worker can do is do nothing.
Examples of successful reconstruction include the white head of Meniu (Louvre), Hemiun (Pelizaeus-Museum) and the quartzite colossus of Tutankhamon (ISAC Museum). in the light of thoughtless reconstructions, the best thing that can be done for a broken monument is to assemble it on a metal frame, as Kh. Suruzyan assembled the sculptural group AMON and MUT from Karnak in the Cairo Museum in 2000, without modern tasteless additions. sometimes it is the fragmentation of the monument that is its attractive side. Would the famous lips of Teye (Metropolitan) made of yellow jasper have become a classic of ancient Egyptian art if they were just another whole portrait of the royal wife in a series of her images? raised on the understanding of antiquity as ancient ruins and fragments of sculpture, they can hardly imagine a solid sculpture of those eras or the fact that antiquity is bright colors and an abundance of ornament, and not the monochrome texture of stone. Thus, the ancient creation is seen as a scattering of unconnected fragments of some alien, lost civilization, and not as a single organism, where every detail appeared for a reason.
While there is an opportunity, every surviving artifact and image should be digitized and made publicly available, and not languish like a dragon over the archives, selling access to each slide. but, even if some crumbs were laid out, their size will be so small that it is not possible to see anything. books with outlines of tomb paintings and texts are generally for the rich. as if they are deliberately fenced off from the most interesting things, reducing everything to a few recognizable artifacts. a preserved ancient monument can disappear at any moment. the Cairo museum was robbed during the revolution, there was a loud scandal after the damage to the Tutankhamon mask, the National Museum of Brazil was almost destroyed by fire, and much more. returning to the crowds of uncontrollable tourists: most recently, on the replicated painting of the vault of the tomb of the artist Sennejem (TT-1), the hand of RA was damaged, the eyes were knocked off on the magnificent paintings of the priest Userkhet (TT-51) and others. Only some reliefs of the burial of Seti I and the painting of the Golden Room of the tomb of TutankhAMON deserved a high-quality scan.
gold. a lot of gold. even more gold. everything is in gold. line, shape, volume are not important, the main thing is to drown everything in gold. like savages who exchanged skins, spices and slaves for shiny trinkets. Egypt - harmony of colors, rare, tasteful gold inserts and, most importantly, a sense of proportion. the image of Egypt now is like the gilded palace of a gypsy baron. sparkling with high cost and shimmering with wealth, there is more of everything everywhere, but absolutely tasteless. This is exactly how a poor man imagines a rich man’s home. The development of Egyptology should seem to contribute to a correct understanding of how Egyptian civilization, the cradle of humanity, existed, but every year everything only slides further into bright primitivism and absurd humor. and with such an attitude towards Egyptian art, does anyone else hope to understand something in other areas?
///When a legacy is left to rot, worms hatch in it\\\
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