A Revolution in Ancient Art: The Bust of Nefertiti

It's one of the most recognisable artworks of the ancient world, but who was Queen Nefertiti? And how did she and her consort, the Pharaoh Akhenaten, revolutionise the art and religion of Ancient Egypt? Join Alastair and James as they explore the mesmerisingly beautiful Bust of Nefertiti. To see the images from this podcast, please switch to video in your podcast app, at any time. Artworks in this episode include: The Bust of Nefertiti, c. 1351-34 BCE, Neues Museum, Berlin Tomb of Nebamun and Ipuky, 1391-53 BCE, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Statue of Amenhotep III, 1391-53 BCE, The British Museum, London Colossal Statue of Amenhotep IV, 1350-33 BCE, The Egyptian Museum, Cairo Colossal Statue of Amenhotep IV, 1350-33 BCE, Luxor Museum, Luxor Akhenaten, Nefertiti and three of their daughters under the Aten, c. 1351-34 BCE, Neues Museum, Berlin Bust of Akhenaten, c. 1351-34 BCE, Neues Museum, Berlin Plaster Head of an Older Woman, c.1353-36 BCE, Neues Museum, Berlin For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: The Discovery of Nefertiti 00:02:14 The Archaeological Dig at Amarna 00:06:14 Ancient Egyptian Art and Society 00:12:50 Amenhotep IV Comes to Power 00:16:51 The Religious Revolution 00:23:31 A New Artistic Style 00:34:35 The New Capital City 00:46:46 The Bust of Nefertiti 00:57:35 Authenticity Debates 01:04:17 The End of the Amarna Period 01:08:22 The Controversial Journey to Berlin 01:13:37 Modern Legacy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Alastair Sooke?

  Welcome to Stories of Art. I am Alistair Sook.

• 0:04James Fox?

  And I'm James Fox.

• 0:09Alastair Sooke?

  Writing in his excavation diary towards the end of 1912, the German Egyptologist Ludwig Borkart recorded a stunning archaeological discovery with these words: "Life-size painted bust of the queen, 47 centimetres high. Colours, as if paint was just applied, work absolutely exceptional. Description is useless, must be seen." Now, it's not going to surprise you, James. I take exception to Borkart's suggestion that description is useless because on this podcast, that is what we do. Description is our speciality. However, I kind of get why on that occasion, that momentous day, words failed it.

• 0:50Alastair Sooke?

  Because Borkart had encountered this lifelike painted portrait bust of an ancient Egyptian queen with this single inlaid eye and a tall, top-heavy, be-ribbined blue crown that I always think seems to sprout from her cranium a bit like a stretched ice cream cup. And this had lain forgotten beneath Egypt's sands for more than three millennia. So of course, I'm referring to the painted bust of Nefertiti, the most famous piece of Egyptian sculpture in the world. It's now a global icon of timeless beauty. It's on a par perhaps with Leonardo's Mona Lisa. It's displayed today in a grand museum in Berlin. And I always feel her head seems to bob about on that very, very slender neck,

• 1:35Alastair Sooke?

  a bit like, I don't know, an extravagant bloom that's swaying in a midsummer breeze. And, you know, she is beautiful, as her name suggests, because her name conventionally is translated as "The Beautiful One Is Come". And despite that missing left eye, this work of art is astonishingly well-preserved. You know, if you look closely, you can see the very subtle brushwork that even the individual hairs of her eyebrows have been picked out, which I think is stunning. And so, you know, this must have been enormously exciting to chance upon this. What do we know about this archaeological dig, James? And also, you know, what do you make of this, this extraordinary work of art?

• 2:14James Fox?

  Oh, it must have been so exciting. I mean, this was a dig that was taking place. It was about three years or so in the years leading up to the First World War, when part of the German archaeological service was excavating this area in the, really, the middle of nowhere in Egypt, which was this great city, which we today call Amarna. And this is when the discovery was made. I find it thrilling. You have quoted the most famous line from Borkard's diary. But my favourite passage in Borkard's diary comes a little bit later in that day. Can I read it to you?

• 2:46Alastair Sooke?

  Please do.

• 2:46James Fox?

  He says, "Tea on the veranda. At sunset, the guests go to the steamboat. Seven thirty, we all go to dinner in Khaki. Nine thirty, back to the house. Twelve forty to bed after this dizzy day."

• 3:00Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, dizzy.

• 3:01James Fox?

  It's dizzy and it was a dizzy day. But one of the reasons I love that is it does satisfy all of the cliches that one has in one's mind about the golden age of archaeology, doesn't it? The khaki, the steamboats, the verandas, the afternoon tea. I would have loved to be there. I really would.

• 3:16Alastair Sooke?

  Very gentlemanly, a sort of different era.

• 3:18James Fox?

  A different era. But going to the bust itself, I think you're completely right. I mean, the bust of Nefertiti is one of the most celebrated works in ancient history. It's up there with the Mask of Tutankhamun, which was discovered only a few years later in Egypt, another great archaeological moment. It's up there with the terracotta army. It's up there with the Parthenon sculptures. But Alistair, unlike those objects, and don't get me wrong, I love them all. Unlike those objects, the bust of Nefertiti doesn't really feel ancient at all. It feels extremely modern. When you think about the naturalism of the features, when you think about the brilliance of the colour, this very sort of art deco silhouette, it feels so contemporary.

• 4:00James Fox?

  And I think in doing so, it transforms our understanding of the ancient Egyptians. It bridges this gulf of thousands of years between us and them. It's a very exciting piece.

• 4:10Alastair Sooke?

  I can't quite gauge. Am I detecting a note of scepticism? Because I don't want to give anything away, but I think we probably will come on to, there have been Some doubts about the authenticity of this piece.

• 4:22James Fox?

  I mean, the piece is extremely controversial for many reasons, as we will unravel over the the next hour or so. And one of those controversies is the question of whether it is authentic or not.

• 4:32Alastair Sooke?

  And I think before we get stuck into the story, something else just to flag at the beginning is it's impossible to really understand or think about the bust of Nefertiti, or indeed Nefertiti herself as a queen, without realising who she was and who her husband was.

• 4:47James Fox?

  Oh, yes.

• 4:48Alastair Sooke?

  Because her husband was one of the Egyptian pharaohs, a man called Akhenaten. And I just find the story of them together so compelling.

• 4:56James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, he's someone who has been described variously as a visionary, a zealot, an iconoclast, a dreamer, a criminal.

• 5:05James Fox?

  A nutter.

• 5:06Alastair Sooke?

  A nutter. That does very well. And, you know, he has a 17-year reign in the second millennium B.C., which we're going to talk about and describe, in which Nefertiti is exceptionally prominent.

• 5:18James Fox?

  Yes.

• 5:19Alastair Sooke?

  She has huge status. And they completely, between them, upend all of these conventions and customs of Egyptian society and culture, and indeed art.

• 5:30James Fox?

  It's an extraordinary story. I mean, it's something you wanted to do. I'm so pleased we're we are doing it. It's a story, obviously, about this very bizarre moment in history, perhaps the most bizarre moment in ancient history. But it's also a story about great art. And it's a story about our own age. It's about our relationship to antiquity. It's about the ethics surrounding archaeology and museum collections themselves. It is a very, very meaty subject. I can't wait to start chewing into it.

• 5:58Alastair Sooke?

  So this is the story of the bust of Nefertiti and the artistic revolution which rocked ancient Egypt during the reign of her consort, the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten.

• 6:17Alastair Sooke?

  This is, as you've alluded to already, it's a big subject. And I think it might be helpful at the off just to do a little bit of scene setting.

• 6:25James Fox?

  Yes.

• 6:26Alastair Sooke?

  Not least, working out where we are in the very long stretch of ancient Egyptian history. Am I right that, well, I'm hoping, James, you're about to give this an unenviable task.

• 6:38James Fox?

  It's a relatively daunting challenge to summarise what, 3,000 years of Egyptian history in the space of a minute.

• 6:43Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, if you could.

• 6:44James Fox?

  But I will do it. I will do it for you, Alastair. Yeah, I think the first thing to say is, you know, the only reason that ancient Egyptian civilisation emerges where it does is because of the Nile.

• 6:56Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 6:56James Fox?

  It's because of this great river, probably, I think, the longest river in the world that runs all the way through north-eastern Africa to the Mediterranean. And this river didn't only provide drinking water, it created these extremely fertile banks.

• 7:10Alastair Sooke?

  Because it floods.

• 7:11James Fox?

  Because it floods, that allowed local people to settle and to start farming, and over the years, to build ever larger and more complicated, complex societies. And so by the time you get to around 3,000 BCE, so that's about 5,000 years ago, you have a pretty established, pretty centralised kingdom in Egypt that is ruled by a divine king called a pharaoh.

• 7:37Alastair Sooke?

  Interesting.

• 7:37James Fox?

  Has a very complex and sophisticated society, a very sophisticated religion, including multiple gods, that will be relevant, we'll come to it in a minute, that believes in the afterlife, that practices mummification. You also have a written language, the famous hieroglyphs. And over the years, after a few hundred years of this, the pharaohs of Egypt become so rich and so powerful that they start building these enormous monuments in the deserts, the so-called pyramids.

• 8:04Alastair Sooke?

  So conventionally, Egyptian history is divided up into these so-called dynasties.

• 8:09James Fox?

  It's really important to say that the civilisation ebbs and flows over the millennia. There are many different dynasties, dynasties rise and fall. There are three main kingdoms.

• 8:20Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 8:20James Fox?

  The Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom.

• 8:24Alastair Sooke?

  And these are moments of strength for the ancient Egyptians.

• 8:26James Fox?

  Yes, and they're separated by moments of weakness. They're interspersed with periods of instability. But one of the really remarkable things about ancient Egyptian civilisation is though, as I say, there are ebbs and flows and things do change, there is also remarkable continuity.

• 8:40Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 8:41James Fox?

  That over the course of thousands and thousands of years, the structure of Egyptian society, the role of the pharaoh, the practice of religion and the style of art doesn't actually change very much. What do you think are the hallmarks of of ancient Egyptian art leading up to this moment?

• 8:59Alastair Sooke?

  Well, it it is interesting because as you've said, the time span we're talking about is so vast.

• 9:04James Fox?

  Hmm.

• 9:04Alastair Sooke?

  And you might think, if you think of sort of Western art and its development since the Renaissance and how different and various that has been, you might think it would be impossible to summarise. But as you have pointed out, Egyptian society, Egyptian culture, customs, traditions, religion, all of these things combine to create something that's very, very unified.

• 9:22James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Alastair Sooke?

  And so if you like the sort of cliche about ancient Egyptian art is that over many thousands of years, it's effectively unchanging. It's it's pretty static. And if, you know, we, listeners, viewers, think of, just off the tops of our heads, Egyptian works of art, often they look quite static. They're quite still, quite sort of formalised. Now, inevitably, that is a little bit of a broad brush thing. There are, within ancient Egyptian art, there are all sorts of changes and subtleties and interesting developments. There's a kind of sense of flux within these parameters. But you can say there are certain qualities that that typify, you know, the hallmarks of ancient Egyptian art. They're to do with

• 10:06Alastair Sooke?

  a sense of timelessness, a sense of eternity. You know, depicting the human figure, often you have, and this is absolutely classic ancient Egyptian, these composite elements. So you have frontality, seeing something front on seems to be very important, but also seeing stuff in profile is very important. So if the human figure, this is in 2D representations, you often see that that characteristic in-profile figure, but the eye is frontal, the shoulders are frontal. And I think what's going on there is that ancient Egyptian artists, artisans and viewers have a completely different conception of art. They don't even have a word for art. Then again, they don't actually have a word for religion. They're a very religious society, so it doesn't mean that they don't have art,

• 10:49Alastair Sooke?

  as it were. But art is about the afterlife, it's about the hereafter, it's about it's about unchanging, and it's also very idealising quite often.

• 11:01James Fox?

  I think that's an important thing to go back to the human figure as well, that when people often look at Egyptian art today, they see these strange sideways figures, don't they? And they ridicule it. There's the Egyptian dance as well, where people do that thing with their hands. And they look at the work and they think, well, this is very primitive, you know, they haven't learned how to depict figures as they were, there's no perspective. That's completely not true at all. I mean, the Egyptian artists were not trying to depict the world as they actually saw it. They were trying to capture the essence of things. And what you described earlier, the idea of showing the eyes front on, the shoulders front on, but the legs to the side and the face to the side. They're trying to show every part of the human body in its most recognisable way.

• 11:42Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 11:43James Fox?

  It's brilliant, it's genius, really.

• 11:44Alastair Sooke?

  It's a very clever sort of semi abstract system. I mean, the other thing to say about it is just sometimes, though, it's also materially dictated by materials, if you like. So sculptors are working with very, very hard stone. As a result, that kind of limits the sorts of positions you can create and carve a human figure into. Often the gaps in between limbs and the body will be left filled in because removing that stone is very, very difficult. And then once you find different materials, sometimes you can find wooden sculptures of people and they're enormously relatively naturalistic. And you can see people with a slight paunch or things that look like real portraits that have come from tombs.

• 12:25Alastair Sooke?

  And something else that I've noticed over the years, looking at Egyptian art, Egyptian artists, they love often the natural world. And so there's a real sense of engagement with an observation of whatever it might be, geese or the natural flora and fauna. And some of those strands of Egyptian art's history, I think, come to the fore in the art that appears underneath Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

• 12:50James Fox?

  Well, shall we get to their story? I think we need to have set the scene here a little bit. We are now in the New Kingdom. We're in the 18th dynasty. It's about 1350 BCE, so about, what, 3,300 years ago. Egypt at this point is ruled by a pharaoh called Amenhotep III. Now, he is one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs. He's like the Trajan or the Hadrian of of Egypt. He's like Queen Victoria, actually.

• 13:16Alastair Sooke?

  It's total Golden Age stuff.

• 13:17James Fox?

  Golden Age stuff. He has a very long rule. He's reigning for, what, almost forty years or so? And this is Egypt at its very peak. And he is supposed to, his successor is supposed to be his oldest son, whose name is Thutmose or Thutmose.

• 13:33Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 13:34James Fox?

  So he is supposed to inherit the throne, but Thutmose dies before his father.

• 13:39Alastair Sooke?

  So the spare, luckily he has a spare.

• 13:41James Fox?

  He has a spare. So when Amenhotep III dies, it passes to his son, who becomes known as Amenhotep IV.

• 13:48Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 13:49James Fox?

  Now, I think this biographical fact is, I mean, I'm speculating wildly here. But I think this biographical fact might be very significant. When you think that Amenhotep IV, who will, I mean, it's not a spoiler, will become Akhenaten. You think he's obviously, he's seen this incredibly influential, powerful father, great emperor, ruling for for for decades. He is a kind of Prince Harry figure. He probably never expects that he is going to become pharaoh and suddenly it lands on his lap. He's, I don't know how old, but maybe eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. He's a young guy, full of testosterone, although maybe not, depending on what we describe later on.

• 14:26James Fox?

  And he probably has a chip on his shoulder and wants to prove himself and wants he could, wants to prove that he can do something better than his father and better than his his late brother. Shortly after, or perhaps shortly before, Amenhotep IV becomes the pharaoh, he marries this girl. And she is only a girl, she's probably only twelve years old, called Nefertiti. She will play a very important role in this episode. We don't know much about her, do we?

• 14:52Alastair Sooke?

  No, her origins are obscure. Her parentage is a total mystery. Some people have speculated, could it be that she was actually the king's twin? Okay.

• 15:03James Fox?

  Right.

• 15:04Alastair Sooke?

  And that's partly because, actually, sometimes you see, in Egyptian mythology, you had this androgynous creator god called Artem. And this god has two sexually differentiated offspring, Shu.

• 15:19Alastair Sooke?

  And Tefnut, the offspring of the creator god. And quite often what you find is that Akhenaten is depicted as Shu, the male part of the offspring, and Nefertiti is depicted as Tefnut, the female sibling. And so people have speculated on the back of that, could they have been actually related? Probably not, but incest is a theme under Akhenaten. It has, historians have noticed that. There's another theory, though, that she is actually, partly because of the name, which I mentioned at the start, which means the beautiful one has come, that perhaps she's a foreign princess. So some of those kings and kingdoms up in the Levantine coast, in the modern day Syria and Iraq and Turkey,

• 16:03Alastair Sooke?

  they are sometimes sending their daughters, almost as a form of tribute, to enter the Harem's of, to marry some of the Egyptian pharaohs. And there is a school of thought that Nefertiti was a Metian princess named Tadukepa.

• 16:16James Fox?

  Right, okay.

• 16:17Alastair Sooke?

  And, you know, she had been related to the preceding king, in this king's twin idea. Surely everywhere she would have, in the representations of her, the texts, the hieroglyphics that accompany those that would have said king's daughter somewhere, but she's never called that, which has made some people speculate. She's, she's come from elsewhere. So she has this intriguing, mysterious origins, but then this also intriguing, mysterious and totally compelling career, because she quite quickly is established as the principal royal wife of Amenhotep IV.

• 16:47James Fox?

  Okay, Alastair, so Amenhotep IV and Nefertiti come to power. But what about Egyptian religion at this time?

• 16:54Alastair Sooke?

  So Egyptian kings throughout time have been associated or have associated themselves with the sun god, the big sun god Ra in the Old Kingdom. And this changes over time. In the New Kingdom, one of, you've already mentioned, it's a polytheistic religion. There are many, many gods, many of them animal headed.

• 17:14James Fox?

  There are probably actually 2,000 gods.

• 17:16Alastair Sooke?

  Is that, is it that big?

• 17:17James Fox?

  There are as many as 2,000 gods in ancient Egypt at this time.

• 17:19Alastair Sooke?

  That is unbelievable, yeah. And one of the, the sort of, by the time of the New Kingdom, underneath Amenhotep III, it's the god Amen, after whom they're named. I think Amenhotep means Amen is placated and he's the sort of most dominant god. But Amenhotep III does take on these attributes of the sun god in the form of the dazzling sun disk. And under his son, it's got, it can't be a coincidence. Because this sun disk god that comes to be known as the Aten, A T E N, Aten. Is, under Amenhotep IV, quite swiftly becomes the sole focus of interest in terms of Egyptian religion.

• 18:02Alastair Sooke?

  In fact, Amenhotep IV becomes quite obsessed, doesn't he, with the Aten?

• 18:08James Fox?

  It's an extraordinary moment. Shortly after the new pharaoh comes to power, Amenhotep IV comes to power. He begins to upend Egyptian society and above all, Egyptian religion. So what he does is he starts persecuting the old gods. So all the old gods that were so important, beginning to be challenged.

• 18:30Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, really, I mean, Amen being the chief one of this. So it's total desecration of Amen's temples, names being hacked out.

• 18:37James Fox?

  He destroys their images, hacks out the names, exactly.

• 18:39Alastair Sooke?

  There's one just on that, James, because I know you're going on to something else, but just very briefly to interject. I think he starts hacking out the word when it's gods in the plural.

• 18:49James Fox?

  Even the, even the.

• 18:50Alastair Sooke?

  It's not even the name of the god, but it's like if gods plural are referred to, time to hack that off.

• 18:55James Fox?

  Yeah, he closes the temples, he replaces the so-called pantheon of gods. I've said the 2,000 gods in Egypt with just one god, the Aten itself. This is truly massive, isn't it? I mean, you know, this is arguably the first monotheistic society ever. I mean, theologians will debate it, but it is quite remarkable. This is 800 years before Judaism, 1,300 years before Christianity, 2,000 years before Islam. We have a religion effectively based around a single god.

• 19:29Alastair Sooke?

  It's completely radical. I mean, it is a revolution. And the other thing about it is that the way this god is represented becomes, well, to begin with. It's possible that the god has a falcon's head. There's some art from Karnak, the great centre of power, where Amenhotep IV was, which he inherited and was reigning, and which he extended. And at the beginning of his life, there at Thebes, that's where his court was. There is some, to start with, some very, some quite traditional works of art. But very quickly, you see this switch in the decoration of the monuments that he, Amenhotep IV, is building.

• 20:05James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 20:05Alastair Sooke?

  And it turns into the kind of classic vision of the artisan is a solar disc. So it's almost like sort of, you know, modern art, Malevich style. I mean, it's just, it's a circle. And then from this circle, you see these schematic lines, which represent the rays of the sun. And then weirdly, they end in, I don't know why I'm finding this so amusing, but for some reason, it always tickles me, almost literally in this case. They end with these, these little hands, right? So the rays of the sun have these little human hands and they are caressing, often in the art of the period, the king and the queen and his children. And we'll, we'll get into this, you know, in more detail in a moment. But that's what you're starting to see everywhere. And, you know, you're right about the monotheism.

• 20:49Alastair Sooke?

  Sigmund Freud sees Akhenaten as a prototype for Moses.

• 20:54James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Alastair Sooke?

  There is this kind of real sense that there are things that happened in the 17-year reign of Akhenaten, that in a sense are still with us today. The big one being this new vision of a monotheistic religion and a sense of man's intimacy, if you like, in the relationship between man and that god.

• 21:12James Fox?

  Yeah, I think it's hard, isn't it, for us today to recognise how radical this revolution was? Because we live in a society where most, the dominant religions are monotheistic religions. It seems natural that you have one god. The Jews have one god, the Christians have one god, the Muslims have one god. But back in those days, there was no such thing as monotheism. Every society was polytheistic. Every society had lots of different gods.

• 21:36Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 21:37James Fox?

  So it was complete, I mean, it's like the equivalent of the Reformation. It's probably more, it's like the equivalent of the rise of communism. It's a truly radical revolution. And as you say, society gets transformed by Akhenaten, by Amenhotep IV at this point. Religion is transformed and art is transformed very quickly.

• 21:53Alastair Sooke?

  And the Reformation analogy is a very good one because in the same way that you found this great furious spate of iconoclasm during the Reformation in Europe, where works of art are attacked and destroyed, that's what you've been describing, that's what at some point, probably relatively early in Amenhotep IV's reign, you get this huge wave of iconoclasm across the country. And it's possible that during the New Kingdom, because Amen had been such a dominant god, that the priesthood, it's possible this is a historical political story, that the priesthood of Amen are very rich, very powerful, and Amenhotep IV, who has this new different vision, needs to somehow shore up his own power base and take them down. That could be part of the story.

• 22:38Alastair Sooke?

  But what we do see is that, you know, I hadn't thought about it in these terms, but you've raised this idea of the problematic second son, you know, not being originally the heir, but the spare, and then suddenly becoming the emperor, becoming the king, as we're becoming the pharaoh. And is he struggling to emulate his father?

• 22:56James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Alastair Sooke?

  His dad becomes the living deity, the dazzling sun disc, Artan. So does the whole Akhenaten project begin out of that, that really, Artanism is about the son worshipping his own father? And he also tries to emulate his dad at Karnak, at Thebes, this great temple complex, by building.

• 23:14James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Alastair Sooke?

  You know, you've mentioned before, Amenhotep III, 38-year reign, he's building so much, extending its kind of empire, it's Egypt at the peak of her powers. Amenhotep IV does the same. He starts building these enormous temples at Thebes.

• 23:30James Fox?

  Yes.

• 23:31Alastair Sooke?

  And one of them, which I need to, well, actually, a lot of archaeologists discover these things called the Talatat block. Have you come across this detail? We may skip over it quite briefly, but essentially, he introduces a new size of masonry block, which provides great unity, uniformity, in terms of what is built. It's a sort of, the measurements are royal, it's a royal cubit. And the idea is that suddenly there's a new proportion. Again, it's a sense of kind of erasing everything that's come before and starting afresh. You often feel that in his, his vision, his programme. There are several major buildings that he constructs at Karnak, and the largest is called Gempaten.

• 24:14James Fox?

  Right.

• 24:15Alastair Sooke?

  Which catchily is translated, as I need to check my notes here, the sun disk is found.

• 24:21James Fox?

  Right.

• 24:22Alastair Sooke?

  So this is the big new religious centre for his big new monotheistic religion. It's 700 feet by 2,000 feet. And in 1925, along the south side of the temple, there were some workers, this is modern day Egypt, of course, they were excavating a drainage canal in this area, and they discovered some fragments of these colossi, these colossal statues.

• 24:47James Fox?

  Oh, yes, right.

• 24:48Alastair Sooke?

  And this is the source of initially, some of the strangest works of art that we find under the reign of Amenhotep IV slash Akhenaten.

• 24:58James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 24:59Alastair Sooke?

  I think you know where we're heading here. I mean, there, there, there's a whole series of them, but there are some in the Cairo Museum, which are very, very famous, and they are supremely odd.

• 25:10James Fox?

  They're so weird. I, I think before we get into them, we should, we should just try to reference how pharaohs were depicted before this. So if you look, for instance, if we don't need to go back in much time, we could just look at how his father, Amenhotep III, was depicted. So in the British Museum, for instance, there are a number of really big statues, lovely stone statues of Amenhotep III. And it's just as you would imagine a pharaoh to be depicted, they're very hieratic, they're very symmetrical. Amenhotep has a very muscular, masculine body, very-

• 25:43Alastair Sooke?

  Idealised, idealised.

• 25:44James Fox?

  Idealised, very generic facial features.

• 25:47Alastair Sooke?

  He often looks quite zen, I think, quite tranquil, very calm.

• 25:50James Fox?

  That is how pharaohs were depicted beforehand. This is very different. How is Amenhotep IV, how is his son depicted?

• 25:58Alastair Sooke?

  So, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's just, it's beyond weird. I'm, I'm, I'm almost speechless. There are probably around about thirty of these sandstone colossi. I think fragments have been discovered, around that number. They're made of sandstone, they're twenty feet high. You just see, in some ways, that tradition you're describing is still there. So you see a pharaoh, frontally, wearing, in some cases, a crown with the kingly crook and flail, which this pharaoh is holding, wearing a kilt, having a pharaoh-like nemesis headcloth. But everything is suddenly distorted, hugely distorted. You have this really elongated

• 26:42Alastair Sooke?

  head and face with this enormous Jimmy Hill chin, which its elongation is even more pronounced because you have this long beard underneath.

• 26:50James Fox?

  Very, very different from the, the features of his father as depicted.

• 26:54Alastair Sooke?

  Totally different. I mean, with, with that face, you have this very long sort of nose with a prominent tip. You've got these hooded eyes, these kind of slit eyes, and very stylized, a mouth that doesn't look at all natural. If you look really closely, the detail of the way the nostrils and the tip of the nose works is replicated in that top lip, the shape of the top lip. So that's just the head, that's already kind of weird enough.

• 27:15James Fox?

  Do you know what Thomas Mann, the German author, says about the face? He says, "It appeared as that of a young noble Englishman, of a somewhat faded family, long, haughty and tired, by no means lacking a chin that protruded downwards and yet was weak, a nose whose narrow, somewhat depressed bridge made the broad sniffing nostrils all the more sunken, and deep-set, dreamy, half-closed eyes, whose eyelids he never was capable of opening fully, and whose languor stood in disconcerting contrast to the unrouged, rather innately and sickly blooming red of the very full lips."

• 27:50Alastair Sooke?

  Which you could summarise as inbred, I think is what he's sort of saying.

• 27:54James Fox?

  It's exactly right.

• 27:55Alastair Sooke?

  Wonderful passage, I hadn't come across that, it's amazing. So what about the body then? Yeah, the body, I mean, then you have all of these other... Distortions. And chief among them are a rather protruding belly.

• 28:07James Fox?

  Yes, pot belly.

• 28:08Alastair Sooke?

  Pot belly, which seems to hang down and possibly, he's wearing this kilt, the sort of, the band of the kilt is being pushed downwards into a U shape. From this portly depict, this representation.

• 28:19James Fox?

  Flabby belly rather than a big, big stomach, isn't it?

• 28:22Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, it's not like football hooligan sort of on tour, but it's just, it's just a little bit, it looks like it wobbles a bit.

• 28:27James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Alastair Sooke?

  And then you have.

• 28:29James Fox?

  Someone was very fat, then lost weight and they've got some excess flesh just hanging down. It's a bit of that vibe.

• 28:35Alastair Sooke?

  I haven't thought about it in such detail, but that, that, that's a wonderful way of putting it. Um, you then have these incredibly voluptuous, weirdly voluptuous, bear in mind that this is meant to be in several cases, a male pharaoh. Really voluptuous hips and, and top parts of the thigh.

• 28:52James Fox?

  Yeah, thighs are very big.

• 28:53Alastair Sooke?

  The word that's often used genuinely in the literature is grotesque.

• 28:56James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 28:57Alastair Sooke?

  And people find it quite odd because the bust of Nefertiti, which probably comes a little bit later and is associated with a lot of art from. Amarna, this later period of his reign, which is very beautiful and refined.

• 29:09James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Alastair Sooke?

  What is going on here? This is total distortion. People have realised, something we didn't mention, we probably should have, is that. One of the conventional ways that Egyptian artists represented the human figure was they divided the human figure into these different units. And there were a set number of units, I think it were, there were eighteen. And so, you know, the knee would cover at a particular point, the shoulders folded at a particular point. And that's partly, there's a kind of canon of proportion. That's partly what gives that consistency to Egyptian artistic representations of people through history. Here, there are two extra units added, which partly accounts for this new elongation. What you're seeing though is not only the, the sort of so-called grotesqueness of the depiction, you're seeing this odd androgynous.

• 29:55James Fox?

  Very androgynous, isn't it? And actually, some of the depictions, there are no male genitals at all.

• 30:00Alastair Sooke?

  Um, right, so very, very weird. The question I've got for you, Alistair, is what is going on? Clearly, the artist wouldn't have done this without permission. The artist wouldn't have deviated from centuries of artistic precedent.

• 30:14James Fox?

  Yeah. Without the pharaoh say so.

• 30:16Alastair Sooke?

  Of course.

• 30:17James Fox?

  Without Amenhot at the fourth saying, let's do this. So what do you think is going on? Why are they, why are they doing this?

• 30:24Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, look, the honest answer is, I don't know, and no one really knows. It is, you know, we have a fact here. There is something which is, yes, in some ways in touch with tradition, but in others, which particularly to modern people like us, who maybe quite like breaks with the past and disruption. It's so radical this moment that that in itself has an excitement. There is a sense of, it's of a peace perhaps with the iconoclasm of Amen and Amen's priesthood. There's a sort of scorched earth policy going on.

• 30:57James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Alastair Sooke?

  It's someone saying, you know, maybe it's actually, let's not give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it's just full on dictatorial, megalomaniacal. It's a man who's coming in, he has this new religion that he wants to stamp and impose on the people. And to signal the change, it's like, look at me here. I think there could also be, you know, there is some more subtlety to the analysis of these colossi. So some of them might be representing Akhenaten. Some of them may even be representing Nefertiti.

• 31:29James Fox?

  Yes.

• 31:29Alastair Sooke?

  And there's one of these odd androgynous voluptuous colossi, which some people speculate, it looks nude. You often, all of them have these breasts, whether they're Akhenaten or not. And there's one that's, I think in Cairo today, that could even be a representation of Nefertiti herself. But it's diametrically opposed in terms of how pleasant it is to look at to the famous bust.

• 31:53James Fox?

  Yeah. What do you feel about the theory? Some people have, have advanced these theories that these strange disproportionate depictions of Amenhot at the fourth are actually how he looked and that he suffered some genetic or hormonal disorder. There's been talk of Froelich syndrome, of Marfan syndrome, that perhaps because of this inbreeding we might have mentioned earlier. That there, that there is actually something in it in terms of the, the accuracy of the representation. Or do you think that's unlikely?

• 32:23Alastair Sooke?

  So I've heard that theory, it is quite commonly mentioned and it has ostensibly something very satisfying about it. You think, ah, that makes sense. Personally, and this is totally subjective, I don't really buy it.

• 32:37James Fox?

  I don't buy it either.

• 32:38Alastair Sooke?

  I think it's more to do with, there is the strength, originality and the kind of radical nature of this new vision and the art is somehow reflecting that.

• 32:47James Fox?

  Yes.

• 32:47Alastair Sooke?

  And the art then changes later in the rain, which we'll get into, and a lot of the extremity, the distortion you're seeing at the start of the rain, this grotesqueness, actually softens and lessens, which I think also runs counter to this idea that it's so-called straightforward, you know, reflection of how he may have appeared or this condition that he possibly had. So I personally don't.

• 33:10James Fox?

  I don't buy it. I think it's more likely, I mean, of course, you know, we have no evidence for this, but I think it's more likely that it's a new artistic style, there's a new form of symbolism emerging.

• 33:21Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 33:21James Fox?

  And that it is a way, perhaps, the androgynous, these androgynous representations are a way of him showing himself not just as the father, but also as the mother of the Egyptian state.

• 33:32Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 33:33James Fox?

  Of being, having power, but also having fertility and marking himself out as different from what came before.

• 33:40Alastair Sooke?

  Absolutely. And, I mean, it might be a good moment to pause because the next part of the story, we have to move location altogether. But I would say that things are about to get even weirder in all sorts of ways. As Akhenaten and Nefertiti, they finally decide to break totally with the past and upsticks and establish an entirely new city at the site of modern day Amarna. And we're going to find out what happened after the break.

• 34:15Alastair Sooke?

  If you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time. And if you're enjoying this episode, please consider following Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts and maybe even leave a review.

• 34:35James Fox?

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. So we are telling the story of Amenhotep IV and his wife Nefertiti. He has come to power and has very quickly, after coming to power, started to change everything about Egyptian society. He's changing the social structures, he's changing the religions, he's invented potentially the first monotheistic religion in history, and he's also beginning to change the artistic style in very, very weird ways. But that change is going to get all the more dramatic, isn't it, Alistair?

• 35:04Alastair Sooke?

  Well, what you find after a few years into his reign is that Amenhotep IV decides to break entirely with the past.

• 35:13James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 35:13Alastair Sooke?

  And he actually wants to leave Karnak and Thebes altogether and found a new city.

• 35:19James Fox?

  So Thebes is where the royal family had been based for hundreds of years at this point. It's the capital of Egypt.

• 35:26Alastair Sooke?

  It's the kind of heartland. This is sort of the centre of Egyptian power, particularly under the New Kingdom. And Amenhotep IV changes his name. He starts to call himself Akhenaten.

• 35:38James Fox?

  And this is what he's best known by.

• 35:40Alastair Sooke?

  Which is what we know of Akhenaten. Exactly. And just to translate that again, it's sort of, maybe it's more catchy in the original Ancient Egyptian, but it sort of means one who is effective for Aten. And relatively soon in the reign, he decides to found an entirely new capital city far away from Thebes and far away from the other traditional political centre or religious centre, sort of heartland of the power of ancient Egyptian culture, which was Memphis, right up nearer to the delta, up in the north. And sort of in between these two places, he decides to found in Middle Egypt this new capital city, which he calls Akhetaten, which means horizon of Aten.

• 36:24Alastair Sooke?

  And I know there's a lot of names, a lot of terminology here, but sort of slightly confusingly, that's often referred to today as Amarna or Tel El Amarna from the Arabic word for the region, for the village that's near the site of this ancient city.

• 36:41James Fox?

  Have you been there?

• 36:42Alastair Sooke?

  I have been there.

• 36:44James Fox?

  Right.

• 36:44Alastair Sooke?

  I have been there. Years ago, I made a series for the BBC about ancient Egyptian art. It really was a long time ago. And we travelled to the site of Akhenaten. And when you go today, it is just a vast scorched sort of dust spot. You can't see much at all. You can't quite understand why there would ever have been a city there. I kept on thinking in preparation for this as well, it's because it's this new build, it's sort of like Akhenaten's Milton Keynes. This is the sort of site for this planned city that he's going to build. But one thing you can see is you look around the site and you can see it's on the banks of the Nile. As I say, it's sort of halfway in between the two key centres of Thebes and Memphis.

• 37:25Alastair Sooke?

  And it's an area where it's ringed, this area by the banks of the Nile, by this kind of big arc of, I think, limestone cliffs that kind of mark out like a giant semicircle. And crucially, there hadn't been a settlement there before. So there's no association with any local national, no, no got.

• 37:46James Fox?

  Which was part of the attraction.

• 37:47Alastair Sooke?

  Huge part of the attraction. So it's secluded. It's kind of like a place for a clean start.

• 37:53James Fox?

  Yeah. It's quite an astonishing achievement because it only takes four years. Within a four-year period, a city has been built that can accommodate thirty thousand people.

• 38:04Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 38:04James Fox?

  Just amazing. And a contemporary source, I have a contemporary source here that describes the sort of opening of Milton Keynes.

• 38:10Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 38:11James Fox?

  The ancient Milton Keynes. And it says, "His Majesty appeared with a team of horses on a great chariot of electrum, like the artan when he rises on the horizon. One took the beautiful road to Akhenaten, the place of creation, which he, the king, has prepared for him, the god. Following this, offerings were brought, and there was a great festival. After that, Akhenaten summoned the high officials and pointed out once again that this place had been created for the artan as a monument to his name for all time."

• 38:41Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm. It's very interesting, that passage, because it's alluding to one of the key things that you find at Armanah at Akhenaten, which is, you know, archaeologists have. It's a dream for them. Yeah. You know, what they've managed to discover, Borkat and all the others, as well as artefacts coming out of the ground, you have this sort of perfectly preserved plan of a pre-planned Egyptian, ancient Egyptian city. And it has all of these different elements. And one of them was this long, long thoroughfare, which is kind of alluded to in the passage you just read, which is now known as the so-called Royal Road. Yes. And this links various key complexes, palaces, temples within the city.

• 39:20Alastair Sooke?

  And periodically, Akhenaten, his wife, Nefertiti probably, they will appear on a chariot going along this royal road. And it's a sign of one of the key shifts you're finding. The cult of the king and the royal family is coming to the fore. And that's what's being emphasised again and again and again. They are Akhenaten and Nefertiti, this sort of high priest, high priestess of the cult of Aten. And whilst they're worshipping the sun disc, the great sun disc garden, actually the people, all of the courtiers, the elite, they're worshipping the royal family, who are these

• 40:00Alastair Sooke?

  kind of intermediaries between humanity and the god, the one true new soul sun disc god. A big temple is built, another, another big temple. Yeah. And I think it's quite interesting, just in terms of, again, the change. Because what you would often find with ancient Egyptian temples is you've got this sort of succession, a series of courtyards, and then spaces which get progressively smaller and enclosed, until eventually you find the sort of holy of holies, where an image of whichever god that temple was dedicated to might appear. Now, with the Aten, the god is the sun above us. Yeah. And the way that we experience this sort of life living, the life giving power of

• 40:43Alastair Sooke?

  the sun is through the sun's rays. And so perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a bit of a radical change to the architecture of the big temple that's built at the city of Akhenaten, because it totally open air. Yeah. So you have the same series of successions of courtyards, but there's no roof. And instead you would have There's a sort of central axis in these mud baked altars which would line that axis. And they would have been piled high with offerings, a lot of food. And after Arten had taken his fill feasting on the food, that food is probably getting distributed to the population of the city. You've mentioned that sort of chariot and I've spoken about the royal road.

• 41:25Alastair Sooke?

  Another feature you find in one or two of the palaces, although it's never, the structure's never actually been found, but you see it in the art all the time, is the so-called window of appearances where, again, the king and Nefertiti might appear and give out gold, maybe other sort of tidbits, maybe phaience jewellery, all these things to the population. So they're, they're sort of rewarding their followers because you have to imagine that these people have travelled a long way.

• 41:50James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 41:50Alastair Sooke?

  You know, these tens of thousands, estimates vary, twenty thousand up to fifty thousand, whatever it is, they're all living in Akhenaten because they've been dragged along by the king and the queen. And to keep them on side, the king and the queen are handing out food, gold, they're giving people houses. The high members of the elite have their tombs cut into the cliffs to the east of the city. So there's a sort of reciprocal arrangement.

• 42:15James Fox?

  One of the things that, that happens in Akhenaten is this cult, as you say, of the royal family, of Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. And this produces quite extraordinary array of artworks that are, are not just weird, but they're extremely beautiful and tender. And the most famous is this altar, it's a relief carving in limestone that's, I think, in the museum in Berlin. And it's really, really extraordinary. You can see here what you have is you have Akhenaten sitting on a chair or stool on the left, you've got Nefertiti, his wife, sitting on a stool on the right, they're facing each other. And above them is the Arten, above them is the sun disc.

• 42:58James Fox?

  And you, you'd mentioned earlier this wonderful motif in which the rays terminate with these little hands.

• 43:03Alastair Sooke?

  Although here they might be ank symbols, I'm not, I can't, I'm not sure, maybe these are hands.

• 43:07James Fox?

  I think there are some fingers as well.

• 43:08Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:09James Fox?

  What is an ank symbol?

• 43:10Alastair Sooke?

  So that's a sort of symbol of, of. Life, eternity and eternal life, which is can be bestowed on people by the gods.

• 43:17James Fox?

  Yeah, so I'm looking closely, there are some, there are some fingers here as well. And what is, what I absolutely love so much about this work is that it's not just Akhenaten and Nefertiti. It's also their three daughters.

• 43:31Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 43:31James Fox?

  Now, they do actually end up having six daughters at least together. You're obviously trying for a son, weren't they? Never quite happened. But these three daughters and the, the tenderness. And the contemporaneity, if you like, of these, of these children is incredible. If you look at it closely. One of the daughters is sitting on her mother's shoulder, playing with her earring.

• 43:57Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 43:58James Fox?

  Another one is sitting on her lap, holding her mother's hand and pointing towards her father. And then there's the other daughter on Akhenaten that Akhenaten is holding and he is kissing this daughter. It's extremely tender and lovely, isn't it?

• 44:16Alastair Sooke?

  Totally tender and lovely. And, you know, Egyptian art sometimes gets a bit of a bad rep. For being too formal.

• 44:24James Fox?

  Yes.

• 44:24Alastair Sooke?

  Too stiff. And although the carving, the proportions of this relief, these are not, it's aesthetically. This isn't the most beautiful work of ancient Egyptian art. I find it so exciting because thematically, in terms of its subject matter. As you're describing, it's doing something that feels so new, but also for us, so modern. There's this great sense of intimacy.

• 44:48James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Alastair Sooke?

  To the art of Imanah, which is totally new. A, a real interest often in gesture, touch. You know, you refer to that sort of playing with the earring. I think there's a relief where, you know, someone's being, a child is being tickled. Children's gestures have been observed and they are being replicated in a way that looks quite truthful. And I think that's a really exciting new development.

• 45:13James Fox?

  Yeah, it's a reminder that, you know, this is three and a half thousand years ago. It's a reminder that children were just as mischievous back then as they are now.

• 45:20Alastair Sooke?

  But it is interesting in terms of Nefertiti herself, because one of the classic things about ancient Egyptian art is to do with the hierarchy of scale.

• 45:28James Fox?

  Ah, yeah.

• 45:29Alastair Sooke?

  You know, the larger you are in a work of Egyptian art, the more important you are. And Nefertiti, and this is not just at Amarna, this is also at Thebes, at Karnak. You see her on a really big scale, a scale traditionally reserved for the pharaoh. In fact, there's an earlier relief where I think she is smiting an enemy. That's a time honoured Pharionic action, if you like, which it feels incredible that the wife of the pharaoh is being presented almost as a pharaoh herself. So there's this new emphasis on the family, the royal family, which I know this is anachronistic, but is slightly sort of Hello Magazine like. You know, you're taken into the palace, you're sort of seeing the private, personal lives of the royal family.

• 46:12Alastair Sooke?

  But they're becoming also a holy family.

• 46:15James Fox?

  Yes.

• 46:15Alastair Sooke?

  A family that we, the population of Amarna, are meant to venerate. And one of the big shifts in Amaran art, which you've sort of alluded to, is previously with ancient Egyptian art, it's all about that sense of looking to eternity, that sense of timelessness, a sense of idealisation. But now we're in the moment.

• 46:35James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 46:35Alastair Sooke?

  There's an immediacy to this art of Amarna, and that's very, very new. And I think, again, to modernise, really, really seductive.

• 46:44James Fox?

  Yeah. Shall we now turn to the masterpiece that emerges from Amarna? The masterpiece that we began this episode with, which is of course the bust of Nefertiti. And the amazing thing about that discovery, Alsta, is we know the name of the sculptor. It's quite remarkable.

• 47:00Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 47:01James Fox?

  He was a highly successful sculptor called Thutmose, and he was obviously very successful. He had this extensive compound of workshops, of courtyards, there was accommodation for artists, there was accommodation for apprentices. So clearly he'd been moved out to Akhenaten in order to undertake all of this work.

• 47:18Alastair Sooke?

  And there's another. The named sculptor called Bak, B A K. And sometimes it's thought that he was responsible for some of the earlier work. And then you've got this guy, Thutmose. He's the chief sculptor of the Amarna period.

• 47:29James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Alastair Sooke?

  But this is what, you know, we were talking before at the very start about that diary written by the German Egyptologist. His team in that winter of nineteen twelve, that's what they're discovering. This sculptor's workshop, we know it's his workshop because part of the, the, the, the architecture there is stamped inscribed with his name.

• 47:48James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 47:48Alastair Sooke?

  And there's this find of round about two dozen portrait busts, including the bust of Nefertiti and an almost finished bust of her husband Akhenaten.

• 47:58James Fox?

  Yes, let me just read, we go back to the diary that we started with. This is what he says, they're going through the compound of this great, this great sculptor. Fascinating in its own right, because we often think, oh, before the Renaissance, most artists were anonymous workers. We know the name of an artist who was working three thousand years ago. Anyway, this is what the diary says, it's his, he says, Borkart, who's the archaeologist, he says. After my lunch break, I found a note which asked me to come to house forty seven point two, which is the compound of Thutmose. It seemed wise to call the most diligent worker Mohammed Ahmed Isnusi and let him do the work alone. Slowly but surely, we worked our way through the debris, which was only about one point ten metres high, towards the east wall of room nineteen.

• 48:41James Fox?

  About naught point two metres from the east wall and naught point three five metres from the north wall, on a level with our knees. A flesh coloured neck with painted straps appeared. Life-size colourful bust of Queen was recorded, the tools were put aside and the hands were now used. The following minutes confirmed what appeared to be a bust. It took a considerable amount of time until the whole piece was completely freed from all the dirt and rubble. And that, of course, was the bust of Nefertiti. It's about forty eight centimetres tall, I think, as you mentioned, it's about life size, weighs about twenty kilos. It's a limestone sculpture, so it's carved from stone, but then there are lots of layers of plaster on top of it to make this smooth face.

• 49:24James Fox?

  And then it's covered in incredible colours and all the pigments that were available to Egyptian artists were used on this. Red ochre, you've got a yellow pigment called orpiment, there's green frit, there's carbon black, there's Egyptian blue, an early synthetic pigment, very beautifully decorated and carved, isn't it?

• 49:40Alastair Sooke?

  Hugely so. I mean, I mentioned some of the details of even down to the individual hairs of the eyebrows, which are being picked out.

• 49:49Alastair Sooke?

  I guess this is the sort of main event, isn't it, this bust? And I'm trying to work out the best way to really discuss it because it's so familiar, so beautiful, in some ways so sort of modern looking. I just wonder, before moving on from that workshop, just it's interesting to see, because we're going to talk about this in some depth, the other finds that were there, I think, are relevant to how we should think about this bust. Because I think I just mentioned, there are these two dozen portrait busts which have been found.

• 50:21James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 50:21Alastair Sooke?

  There are two which seem to be almost finished. One of them is the bust of Nefertiti, but she isn't finished because she has that left, her left eye socket doesn't have an inlaid eye, it's empty. And there's another almost finished bust, which was discovered next to her, of Akhenaten.

• 50:41James Fox?

  She's very badly damaged.

• 50:43Alastair Sooke?

  Which is really badly damaged, probably because subsequently, post Akhenaten, he was shunned by his successors and there was a complete change. You know, Artenism failed, the Akhenaten project was mad and didn't quite work. And just as he had ushered in iconoclasm of Armin's sculptures, so Akhenaten's work was defaced. So probably that bust has been defaced as some iconoclasm of Akhenaten. Possibly it had actually gold leaf on it as well. So you've got these two really quite dazzling works of art, and then you've got these other works of art, some of which seem to portray royal figures from Amarna, others which maybe don't.

• 51:26Alastair Sooke?

  But the thing I find so fascinating about them is in some of them, you see a sense of a sitter with advanced age. So as we move into that Amarna period, you move away from the distortions. Before into this more more of an interest in a kind of naturalism.

• 51:44James Fox?

  They're very naturalist.

• 51:45Alastair Sooke?

  That sort of immediacy. And I think that's what you see in Nefertiti. I mean, she there is a real. Well, what do you think? I mean, there's a sort of tension in the bust, right, between a sense of lifeliteness, the naturalism of her face. And that eye, you know, the iris, the pupil, it's dyed black beeswax with this layer of rock crystal over it, which gives the sense of the cornea, and that makes the eye look so lifelike. But in tension with that naturalism, you have a real sense of something that's been very, very designed. Don't you think? I mean, there's sort of the way the diagonals work, the seamlessness from her head into that crown.

• 52:30Alastair Sooke?

  A sense of this kind of diagonal thrust from the top of the crown right down through to.

• 52:34James Fox?

  Yes, it's like a chevron. It's like a chevron profile, isn't it?

• 52:38Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 52:39James Fox?

  I I think it's just incredible. I think it's so, so beautiful. Reminds me, dare I say it, of my wife. But, you know, you get, as you say.

• 52:48Alastair Sooke?

  Should I have said it reminded me of mine there? I don't know, too late. Sorry, Catherine.

• 52:51James Fox?

  But it doesn't have, as you rightly say, none of the stylisation that you see earlier on in Akhenaten's reign. It's very, very naturalistic in many ways, though, isn't it? You think of those tendons in the neck. Almost my favourite part of the sculpture is the way the neck has been done, the particular shape of the ears. Did you know that everyone has a unique shape inside their ear? It's called the ear print.

• 53:13Alastair Sooke?

  Ah, I did not know this.

• 53:15James Fox?

  A very specific, although the ears are quite damaged, you can see that it's a very particular shape that the artist has depicted there. You get the same if you look at the work, depictions of Hadrian. Hadrian had a very strange ear.

• 53:27Alastair Sooke?

  Right. Is that how people can identify? He always had a beard. That's a bit easier identifying.

• 53:31James Fox?

  But but the but the ear, that he had a particular folded earlobe.

• 53:35Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 53:35James Fox?

  That artists often depicted, and so you can often identify him that way. So obviously, the artist has gone to a great deal of effort to try to capture the specificity of her likeness.

• 53:47Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, slightly damaged, parts. The ears were in fact damaged, but also on on the crown, there would have been this rearing cobra, a kind of emblem of royal power on the front. And you do have that sense, which I think Borkart's, you know, I think you were quoting, that that sort of sense of the, I love the ribbon that goes around the crown, breaks up this expanse of blue, but also the way it wraps back in, there's a slight sense almost of some of a breeze. You do have a similar sense of the improbability of so much weight above. Things get bigger and bigger, that funnel shape that kind of extends. And then this very, very narrowed neck, it feels improbable that that could even support her head. But there is a sense, because of that chevron-like design that you've described,

• 54:30Alastair Sooke?

  that she's quite active, don't you think, that she's sort of, there's a sense of movement.

• 54:35James Fox?

  Darting forward, yes.

• 54:36Alastair Sooke?

  Exactly.

• 54:36James Fox?

  What do you think is the is the function of this piece?

• 54:39Alastair Sooke?

  Right, well, this is the key question. And this is why the fine spot is so important.

• 54:44James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Alastair Sooke?

  So this bust is discovered in a sculptor's workshop with other busts, most of which appear much less finished, some of which seem to have almost like a sort of marks on them as though to suggest that they could have been models, right? So for a lot of people, they're thinking, Amarna, here's this big new city, Akitaten, it's bil bil billed on every side. It would have been, there would have been decoration everywhere, you know, painted walls, you know, obviously the religious sculptures that would have appeared in temples, private reliefs that people could have had to worship the Holy Family. So there was perhaps a need for a new school of artists and sculptors and artisans. And this particular guy took those. Maybe he himself actually has in this big compound, relatively big compound,

• 55:31Alastair Sooke?

  a school of artisans and artists. So perhaps all of these busts, they're models showing people how to create an image, an acceptable, standardized royal image. On the other hand, though. Nefertiti's bust does appear almost finished if it wasn't for that missing eye. There's no particular need to have painted the bust because, you know, the way that things would have appeared in terms of colour, that was very standardised. You didn't need to show that to a young training artisan, right? And the thing that's a bit of a mystery about that eye socket, which is empty, is, according to Borkart at least, there's absolutely no trace anywhere within it

• 56:13Alastair Sooke?

  that it was ever, it ever contained an inlaid eye.

• 56:17James Fox?

  Yes.

• 56:18Alastair Sooke?

  And some people have speculated that, well, maybe that's to do with the classic orientation of a figure in Egyptian arts. In other words, this bust would only have needed to have been seen from the right side.

• 56:30James Fox?

  But then why would he paint it on the other side?

• 56:32Alastair Sooke?

  Then why paint the other side? You know, it really is quite baffling. I mean, what's your hunch?

• 56:37James Fox?

  I don't know. I mean, I think they looked, didn't they, very, very hard for the part of the eye which they thought might have fallen out? And they never found, it has not been found.

• 56:46Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 56:46James Fox?

  So it suggests that there was never an eye in there. I think one idea potentially is that perhaps it wasn't finished quite yet. Maybe the eye was the last thing you did. Or could it be if it was a studio model that you didn't need to have both eyes? You would have it as a demonstration of this is what it looks like behind, before you put the eye in, and this is what you do when you put the eye on.

• 57:06Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, I think the theory, a bit like those sort of medical models where you can take them apart and you can sort of find the organs underneath. I mean, it's like, if you were creating a bust like this, this is how deep that socket needs to be. That's what it looks like. And then, look, it slots in kind of like this. It's an aid. But it seems remarkably well done to be an aid. And the other, the other models that were found there, they clearly are models.

• 57:30James Fox?

  Yes.

• 57:31Alastair Sooke?

  They're just not finished to the same degree. So that's itself quite odd.

• 57:34James Fox?

  Yeah. And this has raised questions that have continued to this day, which is the questions surrounding the so-called authenticity of the work.

• 57:42Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 57:42James Fox?

  Where do you stand on this, Alastair? Because obviously a number of scholars have in the 20th century, really since the very beginning actually, have been saying, well, it's something a bit fishy about this work. The circumstances surrounding the discovery, the brilliance of its preservation, the incredible modernity of it, a lot of people have suspicions and think it was either a forgery made by Borkart himself shortly after, during the dig itself, or indeed a forgery made during the Nazi period under the instructions of Hitler.

• 58:16Alastair Sooke?

  Is that right? I hadn't heard that one.

• 58:17James Fox?

  Yeah. But where do you stand on that?

• 58:18Alastair Sooke?

  Well, I think it's probably worth just providing a little bit of context. Sculpture today can be seen in Berlin.

• 58:26James Fox?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:27Alastair Sooke?

  It's in the Neues Museum and it was given a new sort of display, a new sort of setting in 2009, I think. And at that moment, there's a Swiss art historian called Henri Stirling, and he had been researching this, this was his hobby horse, is what he'd sort of thought for some time. He used, in a sense, perhaps even exploited the moment of publicity about the bust.

• 58:48James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 58:49Alastair Sooke?

  And made a real splash. I think there was a book, certainly he was prominently out there, sort of with, making the argument that this thing was a forgery. And his argument went something along the lines of, look, looking at it, it's just too good to be true.

• 59:03James Fox?

  Yeah. It's too new to be true, was his phrase.

• 59:06Alastair Sooke?

  Too new to be true, which is rather ingenious. He sort of referred to things like the way that you see the shoulders are cut, he claims other Egyptian busts wouldn't have been cut in that particular way. He also, and you were sort of building towards this, I think, he looked at the find again. And he, I mean, this is where I just don't find the argument that compelling, I have to say, his one.

• 59:29James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 59:29Alastair Sooke?

  So Borkart actually isn't there at the moment of discovery. And the reason he's not there is because he's gone to greet some important, some VIPs.

• 59:39James Fox?

  He's gone to the steamboat.

• 59:39Alastair Sooke?

  He's gone to the steamboat. And the passengers on the steamboat were some Prussian nobility, I think, there's like a prince, a sort of royal party and they're coming along. And the argument is that Borkart separately had had this bust commissioned and made of Nefertiti, possibly to test the colours of ancient pigments, possibly something to do with, to test, you know, whether or not Nefertiti would have worn a particular item of jewellery, something like that. And it's kicking about there. And then there is this exciting find, it's in the workshop, these busts are being, these sculptors' models are being dug out the ground. Along comes Prussian Prince, who happens to be a really good amateur photographer, and he goes, "Oh, look at this one."

• 1:00:15James Fox?

  Yeah, what a great discovery, Borkart. Good thing, well done.

• 1:00:18Alastair Sooke?

  And, and the argument is that Borkart basically bottles it because this prince is there, and he can't bring himself to say, "Oh, no, your highness, no, no, no, actually, that's just a modern replica." And he goes along with it. And from there, this kind of accidental fiasco then turns into...

• 1:00:34James Fox?

  It's not persuasive, is it?

• 1:00:36Alastair Sooke?

  It's so far-fetched. I mean, presumably to be run to be, I don't know much about Borkart, I'll be honest, but to be a very prominent Egyptologist, running a huge team of people, you know, this is international, high-level politics, essentially, needing to get licenses, grants. You're not going to be some wallflower who's not going to be able to say boo to a goose when this prince comes along. So if that's... Also, subsequently, the museum has done...

• 1:00:59James Fox?

  Various tests.

• 1:01:00Alastair Sooke?

  So many tests.

• 1:01:00James Fox?

  So they've tested the pigments, they've found that the pigments are historic. I mean, Stirling has, has counted that by saying, "Well, they would have found the original pigments and used those."

• 1:01:09Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09James Fox?

  The plaster is historic.

• 1:01:11Alastair Sooke?

  That's critical, as I understand it, because supposedly that formula that was used by the ancient Egyptians was lost.

• 1:01:18James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Alastair Sooke?

  So whilst a counterfeit, a yes, could have sourced many of the natural pigments we know ancient Egyptian artists used, they couldn't have known the kind of chemical formula of that type of plaster, which is scientifically proven to be on the bust.

• 1:01:31James Fox?

  The other thing that was done is 15 years ago, there was some CT scans done of the bust. And it found that it's a plaster render on top of a limestone core. And what they found with the CT scans is the limestone core is also immaculately carved in the shape of her face. It's not just a lump, it's beautifully carved. And no forger would go to the effort of carving a piece of stone, absolutely perfect likeness, and then putting the plaster on top of it. They would do a more simple job. So it seems to me very unlikely that this could be a forgery.

• 1:02:05Alastair Sooke?

  So I think we can dispatch that, that theory. But, I mean, what's your take on, on the purpose of this thing? You know, to me, it just seems not too good to be true, but too good to be a sculptor's model. And I wonder what you think about that?

• 1:02:22James Fox?

  I don't know. I mean, I think, obviously, it was, we, so we know it was found in his workshop. We know that there were lots of other artists and sculptors working in that workshop. I sort of do think, I am persuaded that it was, this is Borkart's original theory, that it was a model that was being used for pectoral functions within the workshop. I kind of am persuaded by that, and I think it does explain why there's no I. It explains why it was found where it was found. It explains why it perhaps might be alongside lots of other busts. And it explains perhaps why we don't see any other of these items or this kind of representation elsewhere. So I think possibly that is the argument.

• 1:03:04Alastair Sooke?

  Fair enough. I mean, we're probably not going to solve that riddle right now. I mean, if we did, that would be quite newsworthy. She is just in terms of as a work of art, though, like model or not. What, how do you sort of respond, you know, because you mentioned that relief before, and some of the art associated with Akhenaten, it is so odd and distorted. You don't really find that here. I think legitimately, this is aesthetically exceptionally good.

• 1:03:31James Fox?

  Exceptionally good. I think everything about it. I mean, technically, it's extraordinary. I think its condition is extraordinary, the quality and the brilliance of design, the efficiency of the silhouette, and it's just absolutely exquisite work of art at every level.

• 1:03:48Alastair Sooke?

  And a reminder too of the prominence of Nefertiti, which historically is so fascinating. You know, we don't know who she was really, where she came from, but she rises, she's effectively, she may even have been co-regent with Akhenaten. She certainly is represented in the manner of a pharaoh at various points. She seems to have this new throne name, which suggests that, you know, what happens next is that, you know, we should probably just wrap up that story, right? So Imano exists, it has these tens of thousands of people. It's this rather more beautiful version perhaps of Milton Keynes, but they're in antiquity. Akhenaten in year seventeen of his reign. During that year, he dies.

• 1:04:31James Fox?

  Yes.

• 1:04:32Alastair Sooke?

  And what happens next actually slightly baffles scholars. There were all of these competing theories. I mean, in preparation for this, I was desperately trying to get my head around them all. And, you know, I could try and unpick them, but the truth is, no one quite knows. You have this moment where there's an ephemeral king called Smenkara. And some people even think that this king might have been Nefertiti, who could have already been co-regent with Akhenaten during his lifetime. But eventually, that king disappears, whether or not that is Nefertiti. And the successor is someone called Tutankhamun.

• 1:05:11James Fox?

  Again, after the Aten.

• 1:05:13Alastair Sooke?

  After the Aten.

• 1:05:13James Fox?

  Related to Akhenaten, do we think?

• 1:05:18Alastair Sooke?

  Possibly the son of Akhenaten, but again, equally, quite possibly not. A lot of people, I mean, it's one of the central conundrums of ancient Egyptian history. It's still a riddle which hasn't been solved. And part of the reason for that is because he comes to the throne probably aged around about 10. He's a boy king.

• 1:05:37James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Alastair Sooke?

  And we, in the modern era, know him by a very, well, not a very different name, but by a different name.

• 1:05:42James Fox?

  Yes, he changes his name to, drum roll.

• 1:05:46Alastair Sooke?

  Tutankhamun.

• 1:05:48James Fox?

  Yes.

• 1:05:49Alastair Sooke?

  And it's so significant, this, because, okay, here is the famous boy king Tutankhamun, whose tomb is later discovered, as you say, by Howard Carter. We know that famous golden funery mask, all of these wonders and splendors and riches from his tomb. But in the context of ancient Egyptian history, he's not one of the most important pharaohs at all. You know, he's, he lives when he's quite young, he's ruling when he's quite young, he dies when he's quite young, probably still in his teens. But, so in theory, you've got an older group of people who will probably be holding the reins of power. And what they decide to do... Is to reverse all of the reforms of Akhenaten.

• 1:06:28James Fox?

  Yes.

• 1:06:29Alastair Sooke?

  It's kind of like bye bye Aten and hello again Armin. Hence the name change. And that name change is one of the biggest piece of evidence we have that this happens.

• 1:06:37James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Alastair Sooke?

  There's a kind of a, what do they call it? Restoration decree where Tutankhamun is supposedly talking about the ruinous temples in the land and how he's going to reinstate the power of Armin. So, you know, the Armin priesthood are thinking, right, thank goodness. We've effectively been sidelined and banished. We can come back now.

• 1:06:56James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Alastair Sooke?

  And it's sort of the end of the Armana project. Gradually, people leave.

• 1:07:01James Fox?

  They leave the city. Yeah, all that, all those years of work to make this beautiful city. The city is abandoned. Actually, lots of the buildings are dismantled. The materials are used. But in the aftermath, in the subsequent pharaohs after Tutankhamun, it's not just that the, the idea of this monotheistic religion is abandoned. Akhenaten himself is kind of scrubbed from the historical record, doesn't he?

• 1:07:23Alastair Sooke?

  I think he's referred to sometimes as the criminal of Akhenaten, i.e. not even by name. He is seen as this great heretic. You know, perhaps that bust found with the bust of Nefertiti is evidence of that. It's been defaced. You find post Tutankhamun, there are a couple of successors. There's a couple of military men who become pharaoh for a bit. There's a guy called Ai, who was chief charioteer. There's another general called Horemheb, who rules for longer. And particularly under Horemheb, I think there's this real spate of iconoclasm of everything that Akhenaten stood for. The city of Armana is raided and a lot of it's used to create this other settlement, Homopolis, on the other side of, of the river Nile. And yeah, effectively Akhenaten and Armana are scrubbed from history,

• 1:08:08Alastair Sooke?

  disappear under the sands, slowly forgotten for, well, for millennia.

• 1:08:12James Fox?

  Yeah, until, until Borkart and other archaeologists at the beginning of the 20th century begin to excavate it and discover part of this extraordinary history. I just thought I'd like to just, as we begin to wrap up this episode, talk a little bit about the afterlife of the bust of Nefertiti. Because it is fascinating. It is part of the story. What I think we need to start by saying is that at the point at which the bust of Nefertiti was discovered in the early 1900s, there was a system in place in Egypt called Parthage.

• 1:08:44Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 1:08:44James Fox?

  So Egypt was being run by the British at that point, and the archaeological service was one run by the French. This was a colonial era after all. And what would happen is, Western archaeologists would come into Egypt, they would do their, do their, their work, and then the finds would be split into two.

• 1:09:01Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01James Fox?

  You would divvy them up, half would remain in Egypt, because Egypt didn't want to lose all of its archaeological treasures, and half would be then taken back to the country in which the archaeological team came from. And the understanding was that the best stuff would typically be kept in Egypt. So that's obviously what happens to the funerary mask for Tutankhamun in the 1920s. And so after Borchardt discovers the bust of Nefertiti and various other things, he divvies it up, he makes two piles, one of which he wants to bring back to Berlin, and one of which is to be kept in Egypt. And cheekily,

• 1:09:36Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:36James Fox?

  he puts the Nefertiti bust in the box that he wants to take back, back to Germany.

• 1:09:41Alastair Sooke?

  You kind of would, wouldn't you?

• 1:09:42James Fox?

  You would. Give it a go. And so on the 20th of January 1913, this is a month or so after it is discovered, he presents his, if you like, divisions of the spoils to the antiquities service, which as I say is run by the French. And there's a guy called Gustave Le Fevre, who has to decide whether that's okay or not. And for some inexplicable reason, Alastair, he decides to let Borchardt leave with the bust of Nefertiti.

• 1:10:09Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:10James Fox?

  This is an extremely controversial moment, even now 100 years plus later. No one can quite understand why he does this. And some have said that he was hoodwinked by Borchardt, that Borchardt, and we do know this from the date, from the documents, he didn't say it was Nefertiti, even though he probably did know it was Nefertiti. He said it was a plaster sculpture, when clearly when you feel about, feel the weight, it's not plaster, it's got stone inside. And there was an original earlier discussion that all plaster items, because they were seen as less valuable, could be removed.

• 1:10:41Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 1:10:41James Fox?

  He also submits a very poor quality photograph. So perhaps he slightly hoodwinks Le Fevre. It's also possible that Le Fevre was just lazy

• 1:10:51Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:51James Fox?

  and didn't look carefully at the, the items and the inventory. And there's also perhaps a theory from some that there was an Egyptian backhander and some money had been given to Lefever to look the other way as the bust gets removed.

• 1:11:05Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 1:11:05James Fox?

  And indeed, Borkart ends up removing the bust of Nefertiti from Egypt. He cannot believe his luck.

• 1:11:11Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11James Fox?

  And he doesn't want to try his luck, in fact, because when he finally gets it back to Germany, to Berlin in 1913, all of the finds from Amarna go on display, but not the bust.

• 1:11:21Alastair Sooke?

  That is odd, isn't it?

• 1:11:23James Fox?

  It was almost as if he knows he got lucky. He doesn't want to generate a controversy, so he keeps it back.

• 1:11:31Alastair Sooke?

  Well, my understanding is that the entire expedition has been financed by this philanthropist called James Simon, this German Jewish cotton merchant.

• 1:11:41James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:41Alastair Sooke?

  And so for a spell, by rights, what's discovered and ends up on the German side is his property.

• 1:11:48James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:49Alastair Sooke?

  He subsequently bequeaths all of this wonderful stuff from Amarna to Berlin's museums. But for a period, perhaps for that first initial decade, isn't it meant to be in his villa somewhere?

• 1:12:01James Fox?

  I think it's on his desk.

• 1:12:02Alastair Sooke?

  Is it on his desk?

• 1:12:03James Fox?

  But why wouldn't you have the star find, the star discovery at least temporarily displayed?

• 1:12:09Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 1:12:09James Fox?

  I think it's, they know that this is a very sensitive item. And indeed, it does eventually go on display. Nine years later, in 1924, it goes on display. And just as I think Borkart had predicted, there is a massive hoo-ha. The French say, this was a terrible mistake. It should never have left the country. It needs to go back to Egypt. The Egyptians are calling for it to be returned. There are very significant disputes, geopolitical disputes over this. The Egyptians then withdraw the Germans' licence to undertake future archaeological digs in Egypt. Then a swap is proposed, which the Germans turned down. Then in 1933.

• 1:12:48Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48James Fox?

  Very unlikely hero, Hermann Göring, the Nazi politician, he offers to return the bust to Egypt. But Hitler, who loves the bust, says, absolutely not. We're not letting this bust leave Germany. And so it stays on display in Germany through the 1930s until the Second World War. When it gets hidden, it goes into a bank vault in nineteen thirty nine, it then gets put in a bunker near the Berlin Zoo, it then ends up in a salt mine. And it's only right at the end of the Second World War that as the Allies invade Germany, they take ownership of the bust. And then there's a long period of several decades when, of course, Berlin is behind the Iron Curtain, where they're trying to work out how to exhibit it.

• 1:13:31James Fox?

  And eventually, as you say, it goes on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin as it is today. But one of the things throughout this period, throughout the last century or so, since the bust was properly publicised, there have been continuous requests by the Egyptians to have this work back, to have it returned to Egypt. And that has only intensified in recent years, hasn't it, with the development of the new Great Egyptian Museum in Cairo?

• 1:13:57Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah. I mean, what we are wading into here is one of the thorniest sort of debates that is currently, has the art world in its thrall, which is that question of restitution. And it's not just the bust of Nefertiti, there are many famous, infamous objects, artefacts, which have similar claims, there are similar debates and arguments, you know, Parthenon marbles, Benin bronzes, being two very obvious examples in Britain. And some museums are starting to give things back. It is such a vexed and complex kind of topic.

• 1:14:34James Fox?

  It's an episode and it's a right, isn't it, really?

• 1:14:36Alastair Sooke?

  It is really, really interesting.

• 1:14:39James Fox?

  It's a very complex issue, and it's a testament yet again to the enduring power, not just of art in general, but this extraordinary work that continues to capture the imagination, doesn't it?

• 1:14:49Alastair Sooke?

  I think so. I mean, there's even, did you come across this detail in research for this? Plastic surgeons, they can perform an operation which is known as the Nefertiti lift.

• 1:14:59James Fox?

  Oh.

• 1:15:00Alastair Sooke?

  Which I love.

• 1:15:00James Fox?

  Wow, Nefertiti lift.

• 1:15:02Alastair Sooke?

  But yeah, I mean, this bust has become totally this global icon. And in terms of the legacy, though, artistically, I'm more compelled by thinking in general terms about that. Armana moment.

• 1:15:16James Fox?

  Yes.

• 1:15:17Alastair Sooke?

  The sort of sense of it, the monotheism, that kind of radical visionary nature of what Akhenaten and Nefertiti were trying to do. And then, not the grotesque, distorted, earlier Armana art, associated with the Armana period, but the later Armana art, where it becomes really quite refined, sensuous. There is an interest in naturalism. There's an interest in things like, as we've discussed, intimacy, immediacy, a newfound interest in emotion. These are all kind of aspects which Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their artists and artisans brought to art history. And even though their names, Akhenaten's name, was scrubbed from history, a lot of those qualities actually did survive. And in a funny way, those qualities, some of which we see reflected in the bust of

• 1:16:01Alastair Sooke?

  Nefertiti, are their legacy, their principal legacy.

• 1:16:04James Fox?

  He may have been an utter, but what art came out of that moment?

• 1:16:08Alastair Sooke?

  Absolutely. Well, look, fantastic. Thank you, Jones. Wonderful discussion.

• 1:16:12James Fox?

  Until next time.

• 1:16:13Alastair Sooke?

  Goodbye.

• 1:16:14James Fox?

  Goodbye.

• 1:16:20Alastair Sooke?

  If you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts, and maybe even leave a review.