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
real portraiture. Drawing on the past brought true rebirth not only within the parameters of art but in almost every aspect of life. Within a short time "living in the past" became a pillar of the literary elite's self-identification: the members of the upper social classes regarded themselves as the bearers of a pure Egyptian culture and drew a distinction between themselves and the lower classes and those who represented foreign cultures. The organisers of the exhibition strove to present the art of the Twenty-fifth-Twenty-sixth dynasties in the widest possible cultural context, displaying artefacts from the past, looked upon as a model, all the way to the renaissance of the renaissance, when barely two decades after the rule of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, the works of the age of the renaissance were regarded as the purest manifestations of Egyptian art. The exhibited material was composed of artefacts —some famous and some yet to be discovered by the public — from renowned European collections, selected with the expert hand of the Italian curator, Francesco Tiradritti, who invented the exhibition concept. Compared to the show in Ljubljana, some changes were introduced, and, importantly, the statues from the Museum of Fine Arts' own collection, dating from the Late Period and executed with great craftsmanship, as well as the impressive Pannonian artefacts of Egyptian cults coming from the Hungarian National Museum and the Savaria Museum in Szombathely were displayed in a broad historical context. The most prized item at the exhibition was without doubt the Palermo Stone, a slab inscribed on both sides. Apart from being a curiosity (it was the first time for decades that it was taken away from the Salinas Regional Archaeological Museum in Palermo), this artefact also threw light on the difference between narrative historiography and the Egyptian approach to history, according to which the history of the country is the sum of the consecutive periods of rule of the kings. The Palermo Stone, the reliefs, sculptures in the round and architectonic elements allowed visitors an insight into the types of ideals in various genres that later reappeared in the art of the Egyptian renaissance and the codified forms of the language of ancient Egyptian art, and provided a sampler of the various forms of archaisation and turning towards the past. A small statue from the New Kingdom depicting Mentuhotep II, the pharaoh who reunited ancient Egypt, w r as an example of sculpture paying a tribute to historical figures revered as local "patron saints" on account of their deeds, while the limestone statue of Ramesses II, most possibly from the ancient city of Abydos, representing the mutual relationship between god and king, and thus the basis of Egyptian cosmology, was a memento of the archaising trend that characterised long periods of rule and the ambitions to revive the past. Artefacts alluding to the past as a means of propaganda and legitimation were represented at the exhibition by the sphinx statue of Osorkon I, a pharaoh of Libyan origin, and a calcite king's statue remi-
