an unmatched success during its day<\/a>, and one rarely imitated in the years since.<\/p>\n\n\t\u201cDivine Egypt,\u201d the first large-scale Egyptian art show at this museum since 2012, is no Tut blockbuster. It is a decidedly low-key affair, albeit quite a large one, with 210 or so priceless pieces included. (Some 140 of those works are from the Met\u2019s extensive Egyptian art holdings; curiously, none of the rest are on loan from Egypt itself.) The exhibition may be set in one of the Met\u2019s biggest special exhibition spaces, but few of the objects are themselves monumental. Many of them are gorgeously wrought amulets and figurines that could easily be held in the palm of one\u2019s hand, were they not encased in glass.<\/p>\n
\n\tCurator Diana Craig Patch, working with research associate Brendan Hainline, has produced an exhibition that does not announce itself as the event that it is, then. But it is a grand occasion, of course, and it\u2019s exactly the kind of show the Met does best, with a clarity of purpose that\u2019s rare in big shows of this kind.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-artnews-2019\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tInstallation view of \u201cDivine Egypt,\u201d 2025, at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/p>\n
\n\tThe show is about the 1,500 gods worshipped in Egypt, though Patch mercifully focuses on only around 25 of them. In thrilling mini-sections that are organized nonchronologically, the curators show how the gods were molded and remolded, depending on when or where you were in ancient Egypt. Iconographies were remixed, remade, and subverted. Deities even became fused together.<\/p>\n
\n\t[See more images of the show here.]<\/p>\n
\n\tThe curators kick things off with an area devoted to artifacts that would have been accessible only to pharaohs, meaning that they were not available for consumption by the public. Here, you can track how iconographies defined Egypt\u2019s deities: Horus, for example, was the god of the sky, and he was often represented with falconine qualities. You can find him in one limestone statue here, rigidly seated upright with an arm behind the back of King Haremhab, who\u2019s posed as if he\u2019s Horus\u2019s buddy. You can also find Horus in a gorgeous metagraywacke sculpture in which a tiny King Nectanebo II stands between his splayed talons.<\/p>\n
\n\tWith other gods, things were less straightforward. In the section about Hathor, goddess of motherhood, dance, and joy, ask yourself: What\u2019s in a face? In one column fragment here, dating to the 4th century BCE, Hathor\u2019s face is human with cow\u2019s ears. In a statue nearby, from the 15th century BCE, she\u2019s turned totally bovine, with almond-shape eyes formed from rock crystal. And in yet another object in the same gallery, a minuscule pendant dating from sometime between the 12th and 7th centuries BCE, Hathor is transformed into Bat, an entirely different cow goddess with a triangularly shaped forehead and golden peepers.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt becomes clear that for ancient Egyptians, the gods were shapeshifters. That much is obvious from a blue-glazed faience amulet showing a falcon-headed crocodile dating from sometime between the 7th and 1st centuries BCE. The bird\u2019s head may be\u2014you guessed it\u2014a reference to Horus. But the long, scaly back? That\u2019s a reference to Sobek, god of the Nile, and perhaps even specifically to Soknopaios, a version of this deity that was worshipped in the Fayum region.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tStatue group of the god Horus and the king Haremhab, ca. 1323\u20131295 BCE.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAnna-Marie Kellen\/\u00a9Metropolitan Museum of Art\/Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna<\/p>\n
\n\tAs the gods transcended temples only pharaohs could enter, reaching the public through objects held in shrines and toted around in processions, the deities continued to change form. Their images could act as the inspiration for board games\u2014do not miss a playing surface here based on Mehen\u2019s curled, serpentine body\u2014and as the influence for certain death rites, with the goddess Bastet\u2019s feline attributes generating an array of cat-themed artifacts, including a mummified cat that happens to look a lot like the baby from Eraserhead.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe mummified cat certainly does bespeak the sense of mystery evoked by Hoving back in 1978, but it doesn\u2019t contain much majesty. That\u2019s not such a bad thing. One success of \u201cDivine Egypt\u201d is that it shows that the gods\u2019 enigmatic presence was not entirely incompatible with everyday life\u2014that these deities were memorialized not only in gigantic temples and heavy sarcophagi, but in easily transportable objects that asserted their strangeness on a much smaller scale. <\/p>\n
\n\tTo that end, I recommend spending a little time with some of the show\u2019s littlest artifacts. My favorite among them is a Hathor pendant that dates from the 8th century BCE, when the Nubian kings ruled Egypt. The goddess\u2019s head is rendered in lush gold leaf atop a carefully hewn block of rock crystal, and its owner, a queen of Piye, knew that this crystal once contained an object of high importance\u2014a \u201cmagical substance,\u201d perhaps, or maybe a prayer wrapped in gold, the curators propose. Today, all you can see is the brown residue that object left behind. Two millennia on, the amulet still contains riddles that resist being unraveled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A block of limestone with four ears carved into it, one pair stacked atop the other. A statue…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[44733,307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60,10159],"class_list":["post-65697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-ancient-egypt","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-metropolitan-museum-of-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}