Compare and Contrast the Work of Art Thutmose, Nefertiti and Portrait Essay

Compare and Contrast the Work of Art Thutmose, Nefertiti and Portrait Bust Of a Flavian Woman - Essay Example At this point the Romans took the Greeks possessions, art included. Though this form of art is borrowed from the previous works of the Greeks, it has characteristics that set it apart as an early ancient Roman artifact. To start off, there is the concept of idealized beauty. Greeks depicted most of their sculptures with Godly beauty, but in this bust we see a depiction of ordinary human beauty. Secondly, the sculpted woman is young as seen in the youthful features of the portrait. In the Greek art world, older persons in society were the ones worth of sculptures. In this case, however, we see that the artist chose to sculpt a younger woman. The bust has an Etruscan or Roman form because, unlike Greek sculptures, it includes head and shoulders only. Most of Greek artists believed that the head and the body cannot be separated. Finally, the portrait of marble stone and the hair structure utilizes the drilling technique, which is a characteristic of this error (Hartswick and Sturgeon 12 0). Nefertiti This portrait is created by the Egyptian sculpture, Thutmose. Geologists speculate that the work dates back to 1345 B.C. In 1912, a German geologist discovered Thutmose’s Studio and the Nefertiti. The error of the statue is made during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaton. The Pharaoh at that time had imposed worship of the God of Sun on the people. The evidence from excavation shows that ordinary people did not uphold the Sun worship religion. In a sense, this religion was to cut the powers of the chief priest and eradicate all opposition to the Pharaoh. Therefore, the Pharaoh’s reign is a dictatorship. In this situation, there is a possibility that the artist Thutmose reserved his ideal depictions to impress authority. However, this sculpture is a deviation from the Amarna art as it derives more from Classical Egyptian art than it does from the strict Amarna art principles. Artists relied on geometry and color to depict personalities, especially royalties, as youthful. As the name suggests, the sculpture is a depiction of beauty, Nefertiti, the beautiful one has come. The portrait, made of limestone, has traces of gypsum on the surface (Lazzari and Schlesier 336). Comparison of Two Works of Art Both of these portraits include shoulders and heads. It seems that in both of these errors the head and the shoulders were enough to represent the sculpture of a person. However, the Nefertiti’s shoulders are vertically cut while the Flavian’s are horizontal. This may be an indication of varying approaches in portrait works applied by Egyptian and Roman artists. This aspect of contrast is, however, debatable as art critiques of such historians as Henri Stierlin and Edrogan Ercivan have come up with the claim that the bust of Nefertiti currently displayed is a fake. They lay their claims on the fact that the shoulders are vertically cut rather than horizontally as is Egyptian shoulder cutting culture. They also bring focus to the bus t’s incomplete, left eye. They claim this discrepancy does not make sense considering this in ancient Egypt was a sign of disrespect (Kleiner 58, 179). The use of color is also characteristic of the Egyptian portrait. Color according to many artists gives life to the lifeless forms. The apparent smile on the Nefertiti’s lips gets emphasis from the red color of her lips. The Flavian’s make up for their lack of color through the use of shadows. The