Made in Ancient Egypt review: a two-day Pyramid bender and the BC Leonardo

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Revealing tantalising new details about the real lives of artists and craftspeople, this show takes you beyond the death mythology and into the realm of magic

Who knew there were famous artists in ancient Egypt with unique styles, depicting what they saw and felt? Well, most of the time there weren’t, although this exhibition does introduce you to one. From the Old Kingdom to the time of Cleopatra, the ancient Egyptians expected very much the same things of their artists, in a style that barely changed. An extraordinary limestone stela, or engraved slab, that was lent to the Fitzwilliam by the Louvre shows how young Egyptian artists were taught to see in the “correct” way, to make nature conform to the official style. A square grid demonstrates how to calculate proportions to render, for instance, a cat in a perfectly still profile, like a little feline god, an abstraction that was to be repeated for millennia.

Yet Made in Ancient Egypt strives to take you beyond the sublime formal facade to glimpse the artists or, as it calls them more cautiously, “makers” behind the golden coffin portraits and pharaohs’ statues. “Who built the seven gates of Thebes?” asked Bertolt Brecht in his poem A Worker Reads History. Here they are, the metalworkers, woodworkers, weavers. In a wooden model made about 4,000 years ago, female workers seated on the ground weave on a loom while others stand spinning thread. You can see a fine example of such women’s handiwork, a white dress made 4,500 years ago. It hangs up, spooky as hell.

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