![]() Artists express their imagination by making sculptures or paintings. I think Tuthmosis thoroughly understood “the beauty of incompleteness,” and therefore did not complete the “final touch.” As in the old legend of the Chinese painter, if the great sculptor had completed Nefertiti’s left eye, she might have blinked her eyes and animated all of her facial muscles, like Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.Īrtists and plastic surgeons have the common trait of pursuing completeness, but never reaching it. Illustration was drawn by Hye Won Hu, MFA (1986–). The dragons then freed themselves from the wall and flew to the sky.Īdding eyes to a painted dragon ( ). As soon as he painted the eyes of the 2 dragons, dark clouds covered the sky, followed by thunder and lightning. ![]() People did not believe him and urged him to add the eyes. He told them that if he had painted the eyes, the dragons would fly into the skies. People were dumfounded when they saw that he had not painted the eyes, and asked him why (Fig. According to the legend, a great painter named Zhang Sengyou (, 502–549) of the Southern and Northern Dynasties painted 4 dragons on the wall of a temple where he spent his leisure time. This mysterious eye reminded me a famous Chinese idiom: “Adding eyes to a painted dragon ( ).” The expression comes from a Chinese legend. 2 Yet another theory is that the bust was a model ( modello) for official portraits and was used by the master sculptor for teaching his pupils how to carve the internal structure of the eye, and thus the left iris was not added. Another opinion is that the artist’s work was interrupted and he left the studio, never to return. 1 However, these theories were abandoned when new figures were found, showing the queen, some at an older age, with both eyes in perfectly good condition. Her missing left eye has been an archaeological mystery, with no satisfactory consensus regarding possible explanations.Īn ophthalmologist speculated that she might have suffered from an ophthalmic infection, and a dermatologist suspected uveitis from Behçet disease. This bust was found in 1912 at Amarna in the studio of the sculptor Tuthmosis, a royal artist who made statues or paintings of the king and of a few nobles. ![]() However, I could not see the pupil on her left eye, as the background of the eye socket was just unadorned limestone. She had high cheekbones, a slender nose, and an enigmatic smile around her red lips and slender neck. Her inner canthi descended abruptly and abutted the upper lid, forming epicanthal folds. She had a long neck, elegantly arched brows, and eyelids outlined in black. It was made from a limestone core and covered with painted stucco layers. The bust was life-sized (47 cm), and her face was almost intact and symmetrical. Bust of Queen Nefertiti (1370–1330 BC), Neues Museum, Berlin.
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