Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2008)
ANNUAL REPORT • A 2008. ÉV - ZOLTÁN HORVÁTH: Egyptian Renaissance. Archaism and the Sense of History in Ancient Egypt
EGYPTIAN RENAISSANCE. ARCHAISM AND THE SENSE OF HISTORY IN ANCIENT EGYPT 8 August - 7 December 2008 Curators: Francesco Tiradritti and Eva Liptay FRANCESCO TIRADRITTI. RENESZÁNSZ A FÁRAÓK EGYIPTOMA BAN. ARCI lAIZMUS ES TÖRTÉNETI ÉRZEK AZ ÓKORI EGYIPTOMBAN, BUDAPEST 2008. HUNGARIAN TEXT, 222 PP.. COL. [LES.. ISBN 978-963-7063-53-4 FRANCESCO TIRADRITTI, EGYPTIAN RENAISSANCE. ARCHAISM AND THE SENSE OF HISTORY IN ANCIENT EGYPT. BUDAPEST 2008. ENGLISH TEXT, 222 PP., COL. ILLS., ISBN 978-963-7063-54-1 If we wish to consider the peculiar features of ancient Egyptian art, one of the first worthy of note is the uniformity of visual forms and the apparent lack of change spanning the centuries. Plato once expressed his view on this in Laws thus: "And if you look there, you will find that the things depicted or graven there [in Egypt] 10,000 years ago (I mean what I say, not loosely but literally 10,000) are no w r hit better or worse than the productions of to-day, but wrought with the same art." 1 In this sense he specified the depictions seen in Egyptian temples as the repertory of models (schemata) fixed in the distant past and compulsory for every period. The stubborn resistance to change in the development of artistic forms, in itself a mechanical repetition of a spent cultural image, is at the same time nothing more than an illusion. Although works of art from periods distant in time from one another demonstrate an amazing degree of similarity, this can be explained by a cyclical return to ancient patterns: what we have here is the natural response of Egyptian culture to the short periods wedged in between great periods of cultural history, when the powerful state was replaced by political division and the flourishing economic and artistic abundance by decline. The destruction of values that had been held to be immutable awoke a desire for nostalgia in the Egyptians for a lost "golden age", thus the recreation of the present in any given period was ultimately achieved by following and bringing up-to-date the models borrowed from the relative past. The concept of bringing models up-to-date is the focal point here, i.e. the ancient Egyptians' conscious selection from the storehouse of ancient models and the re-examination of patterns with the necessary reinterpretation. In this sense the dawn of every main historical period in the dynastic age w r as a kind of renewal, or to emote an authentic Egyptian expression, wehem-mesut, i.e. the "repetition of births".
