The "Meet Ancient Egypt" exhibition at the Shanghai Meets Museum is worth seeing, but due to the impact of the epidemic, everyone can only lose touch with it.
The "Meet Ancient Egypt" exhibition is a global touring exhibition, previously displayed in Beijing, the next stop will go to Chengdu, is a more typical commercial exhibition, the scene of 49 yuan self-service audio guide is really not cheap.
Originally, this exhibition ended on the 8th of last month, but due to the impact of the epidemic, it was postponed twice, and the suspension of business for nearly two months was completed, and the collection was dusty, which was a big loss for the exhibition hall and art lovers. Now many museums and exhibition halls will launch online exhibition halls, but most of them are free exhibitions, and commercial exhibitions do have more concerns in this regard.
I also went to see the exhibition during the New Year, although you can't go to the scene to appreciate the splendor and mystery of ancient Egypt, but you can share some of what I have seen and heard.
I was once very curious about the mythological system and mythological stories of ancient Egypt, the mysterious and ancient land, where a large number of animal and human gods were born, each in charge of a part of the world, and these gods were also very human, love and hate, and there was no shortage of primitive reproductive worship elements and traces of past blood marriages. Influenced by the region, climate and ecological environment, ancient Egypt is located in northeast Africa, with a variety of wild animals and plants, and people worship these unknown and special natural creations. Anubis, the god of death, has a male image of a jackal head, Sobek with a crocodile head, Horus with an eagle head, and so on. With such a wealth of deities and myths and legends, you may think that their works of art must also be strange and innovative, however, ancient Egyptian art works usually have strict patterns, from aesthetics to skillful depictions, highly stylized, but also brilliant.
Because ancient Egypt was in a highly centralized social state for a long time, the pharaohs combined military, political, judicial, and religious powers, and the way and content of his works of art were affected by them. In the exhibition hall, the "Pavo Stone Stele" is engraved with wings and Egyptian gods, and below it are engraved with popular characters and hieroglyphs, and the image of Egyptian gods is very typical. Friends who have seen ancient Egyptian art works must be very curious about their special perspective of depicting gods and men: the head on the side, the eyes on the front, the shoulders above the waist on the front, and the waist below the side, which makes people feel distorted but reasonable, and this special depiction is called "positive law". The concept seems to be very complicated, but if you have seen "Peppa Pig", it is not difficult to understand, this image that is jokingly called "hair dryer" by netizens, the pig face on the side can always see two complete eyes, and the positive body is always facing the same side of the feet, which is the use of the ancient Egyptian "front law". Some of Picasso's Cubist paintings also use this method, such as "The Weeping Woman" and "Guernica", with both front and side on one face, I don't know if it is inspired by ancient Egypt.
This positive law, which is heavily used in painting and sculpture, is also related to the ancient Egyptians' belief in the afterlife, showing human integrity as much as possible and ensuring that the return of the soul is sufficiently complete. "The Egyptians painted what they knew did exist, and the Greeks painted what they saw..." Someone added, Chinese paint what was in their minds.
In any case, the ancient Egyptians followed the established rules for presenting art, stylized but unique in history. This is also reflected in mummified masks and portraits.
One of the major selling points of this exhibition, the golden mummy, in Greco-Roman Egypt, unlike the previous golden masks that only pharaohs could enjoy, ordinary rich people would also create golden mummies for themselves.
In the exhibit "Mummy of the Women of Isos", the head and feet of the coffin are covered with plaster gilded masks, and the body parts are painted with ancient Egyptian gods and hieroglyphs, but these gold masks are not depicted according to the image of the deceased before they were born, but a more idealized image. Assimilated and influenced by Greek culture and the Roman Empire, it may also have been a reduction in cost, after which portraits gradually replaced masks, and a large number of excavations were made in the Fayoum region of Egypt. The portrait directly covers the position of the mummified head and chest, and is also deeply influenced by Western painting, which is no longer a flat and decorative ancient Egyptian feature, but a realistic Greco-Roman painting method that conforms to the relationship between light and dark and structure, which is vivid.
The exhibit "Young Male Mummy" is a well-preserved mummy with a diamond-shaped pattern wrapped in a large amount of linen cloth, with a portrait of a young and thin man painted at the head position. However, through modern scans, people found that there were many curved skin wrinkles on his abdomen and legs, which showed that he was actually a fat man. Many of the similar portraits have fallen off the mummies, and they show different styles of appearance, which is very vivid. However, according to the research of modern scholars, in fact, this is not a realistic painting according to the appearance of the deceased, but has a certain template and is drawn in batches. But it is undeniable that whether it is the use of positive laws or the masks and portraits of Egypt in the Greco-Roman period, although they have their stylized characteristics, the unique artistic expression and mystery are undiminished and fascinating.
Today, we solemnly exhibit these ancient Egyptian treasures, but in the early days of their discovery, they were far from such treatment. Ancient Egyptians, from pharaohs to commoners, had the custom of mummifying, and of the thousands of mummies unearthed, only single-digit portraits and masks were unearthed, and all we can see today is a collection of thousands of selected objects.
At that time, Europe carried out large-scale excavations, a large number of mummies were unearthed, special can be sold at a high price or brought to various countries, and more ordinary mummies, or by the roadside are sold at will, even more as fuel for trains, and even more outrageously, the mummies are ground into powder, known as curative of all diseases, or added to food to increase flavor, which is too much to give mysterious effects. Europe has a brown pigment called Mummy Brown, Mummy is the mummy, read and Chinese harmonic "Mommy" almost the same, the full name is mummy brown, the 16th century began to be popular, is also made of mummy grinding into powder processing, according to the record is more delicate and transparent, many paintings at that time have used this color, the pigment name has been preserved to this day, but has been replaced by chemical materials.
Ancient Egypt had a magical power, mysterious and interesting Egyptian mythology, with its powerful and grotesque parts, highly centralized social structure, resulting in a highly stylized way of artistic expression, and so different. The regret and ignorance of history have long been unable to recover these cherished cultural treasures, and all we can do is hope that mankind will not repeat the same mistakes.