Bust of Queen Nerfertiti

Last week, we already encountered several kinds of sculpture (Venus of Willendorf, Head of an Akkadian Ruler) and the different potential functions that three-dimensional art objects might play.  This ancient Egyptian bust of Queen Nefertiti offers a new category of sculpture: the portrait bust.  This portrait head carved from limestone, and completely in the round, was kept as a model in the artist's studio for the creation of standard likenesses of the ruler.  Nerfertiti served as priestess in the new religion established under her husband's rule and thus has exceptional prominence in the history of Egyptian queens, which perhaps motivated a greater demand for portraits representing her.  The right eye of this bust was never completed with inlay crystal and a painted pupil, likely because this was a model and not a finished work.  We will discuss more background on Queen Nerfertiti in class, but based simply on these images, what would you see makes this work a portrait?  What details of the bust indicate that she is an individual and not just an ideal type, or do you think it is some combination of the two?

And just for fun, here is a clever and humorous take on the difference between Egyptian and Greek approaches to representing the body (sent to me by one of your classmates):

The Woman of Willendorf

The small statue known as the "Woman of Willendorf" was created ca. 28,000-25,000 BCE.  Because we have no idea about the function of this statuette or precisely what it was meant to represent, it is easy to project our own conceptions of the body onto its form, as the funny cut-out sheet of outfits shown here demonstrates.  Yet even if we don't know much if anything about its history, we can still consider it as an object.  According to your reading in Janson, we might be able to see the beginnings of an interest of abstraction in the figure.  How would you argue for or against this understanding of the sculpture as "abstract" beyond what Janson suggests?

NOTE: some of you may have been introduced to this work previously under the title "The Venus of Willendorf" (the title that appears in the still cut-out outfit image above).  Discoverers of this sculpture first associated her with the ancient goddess Venus because of the emphasis on the fertile body, but it is anachronistic and somewhat misleading to do so.  Venus was a goddess of Greco-Roman antiquity and was not a part of Paleolithic culture!  That is why we now call her simply "Woman of Willendorf."