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Studi Poliziani di Egittologia 1 ARTISTS AND PAINTING IN ANCIENT EGYPT Edited b

Studi Poliziani di Egittologia 1 ARTISTS AND PAINTING IN ANCIENT EGYPT Edited by Valérie Angenot and Francesco Tiradritti Montepulciano 2016 This article will appear in: Angenot, Valérie, and Francesco Tiradritti. Eds. 2016. Artists and Colour in ancient Egypt, Proceedings of the colloquium held in Montepulciano, August 22nd – 24th, 2008, Studi Poliziani di Egittologia 1, Montepulciano: Missione Archeologica Italiana a Luxor. ISBN 978-88-908083-0-2. The paging is only provisional and will change on the printed version. IN SEARCH OF PAINTERS IN THE THEBAN NECROPOLIS OF THE 18TH DYNASTY Prolegomena to an analysis of pictorial practices in the tomb of Amenemope (TT 29)1 Dimitri Laboury Directeur de recherches du F.R.S.-FNRS U Liège Hugues Tavier Restaurateur en chef de la MANT Boursier de doctorat à l’U Liège “L’âme d’un grand artiste ne se laisse pas étouffer par des lois : elle vibre, au contraire, d’autant plus ardemment que les barrières sont rigides… Il y a, sans contredit, une manière de traiter tel ou tel thème qui varie d’une époque à l’autre ; mais il y a davantage encore un style propre à chaque artiste, et c’est ce que l’on n’a pas assez vu. Seul un examen attentif des tombes permet de déceler ce caractère individualiste. Pareille étude ne peut donner d’heureux résultats que par l’observation patiente des originaux et l’accumulation de documents relatifs à la technique, à la gamme des couleurs employées, à l’esthétique de chaque peintre. La photographie en couleurs est un appoint que nos prédécesseurs n’ont pas eu. Il faut en user judicieusement et l’appliquer surtout aux détails propres à faciliter la recherche dans la voie qu’on s’est tracée. La récompense d’un tel effort est grande : l’un après l’autre, les peintres de talent se détachent de la masse des décorateurs d’hypogées ; la « griffe » des plus grands d’entre eux se reconnaît parfois exceptionnellement dans deux tombes différentes ; et le but final est de pouvoir citer un jour le Maître de Menna ou celui de Horemheb au même titre que les Primitifs, ces autres anonymes, auxquels cependant on réussit à attribuer plusieurs œuvres.” (Mekhitarian 1956, 247-8) As is well known, Roland Tefnin,2 in his own research over the last decade of his life, passionately pursued this approach to Egyptian art formulated by Arpag Mekhitarian in the mid-1950s. Unfortunately, the “abductor”, as he is called in Ancient Egyptian texts, came to carry him off before he could reach the end of the long and fascinating adventure he started. Indeed, taking the opportunity of the Mission Archéologique dans la Nécropole Thébaine (the Belgian Archaeological Expedition in the Theban Necropolis), which he founded, Roland Tefnin undertook, with the assistance of his wife Ariane, a systematic documentation of stylistic clues that would allow him to begin the search for artists in the necropolis for the entire reign of Amenhotep II and its immediate chronological surroundings. The passion that animated and characterized Roland Tefnin, particularly his passion for Theban painting, was imparted to us during ten unforgettable years working at his side in the necropolis. And so, we too have decided to keep track of the painters of the Theban necropolis in the 18th dynasty, so 1 The present article is a translated version of a contribution we made for another volume dedicated to the memory of Roland Tefnin: Laboury and Tavier 2010. We wish to express here our deepest gratitude to our colleague and friend Todd Gillen for his invaluable help in the translation of this article into English. Of course, any mistake remains entirely ours. 2 Cf. his last contributions: Tefnin 2006 and 2007. DIMITRI LABOURY - HUGUES TAVIER 58 as not to let the torch go out for this properly artistic approach to Egyptian painting, which almost became a tradition in Belgian Egyptology thanks to the pioneering work of A. Mekhitarian and R. Tefnin. In his later contributions, R. Tefnin advocated the necessity for a “close” approach to Egyptian painting, or, to use his own words, “(une) observation la plus rapprochée possible de la facture, de la palette, du geste, (…) qui fera surgir l’humain derrière le schéma, le geste et même la respiration de l’artiste vivant derrière le thème iconographique”.3 It is not uncommon to associate, or even assimilate, the “close” look at the work of art, the close observation of details, with the so-called Morellian method, a type of stylistic analysis developed in the nineteenth century by the famous Italian art historian and physician Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891), who succeeded in identifying “hands” by minute observation of the morphology of certain characteristic details, often at the limits of the awareness of the artist. Even if the transposition of this Morellian approach into the field of ancient art has sometimes yielded impressive results,4 its application to Egyptian painting proves quite problematic, as aptly pointed out by Melinda K. Hartwig.5 Indeed, in a context so readily standardized as that of Ancient Egyptian art, everything, from the aesthetic foundation of the system to its deep semiotic and magical functioning, passing by the modalities of conception and of concrete production of images, everything converges to the neutralization of the individual style of the maker of the work, which literally dissolves, at best, in the style in fashion at the time. Moreover, the distinctions highlighted by R. Tefnin6 are in fact mostly of another kind: they do not pertain to iconography, to morphological details, but rather to its production and, in fact, to technique (Fig. 1). Our experience of joint work in Egyptology, epigraphy, art history and conservation–restoration in the Theban necropolis has convinced us that only a fundamentally technical approach, focusing on 3 Cf. Tefnin 2006, 66. 4 Cf. the well-known work of J.D. Beazley on the painters of Greek vases, in particular Beazley 1956 and 1963; or, in a field certainly more comparable to that of Egyptian art, the study of the reliefs of the Apadana of Persepolis by Roaf 1983. 5 Cf. Hartwig, to be published. We take this opportunity to thank M.K. Hartwig for the amiability with which she shared a preliminary version of this excellent synthesis with us before its publication. Nevertheless, just like this author, we do not assert that Morellian distinctions cannot be singled out in Theban tombs paintings (cf. the very particular case of the form of certain vase handles in the context of variations on the theme of the metallic Aegean vessels in some tombs of the time of Thutmose III: Laboury 1990, 114-115, pls. 26-28). But the indices of this kind are usually too tenuous to allow distinguishing individual hands. Consequently, the role of the artist in the process of pictorial creation in ancient Egypt must be sought elsewhere, before relying on morphological criteria like those of which Morelli recommended the usage, for artistic forms much more recent and of a very different cultural context. For examples of fruitful combination of formal and technical analyses of paintings in Theban tombs, cf. the studies of TT 52, 56, 80 and 104 made by Abdel Ghaffar Shedid: Shedid 1988; Beinlich-Seeber and Shedid 1987; and Shedid and Seidel 1991, 19-21, 29-30. 6 Cf. Angénot and Vaneigem in this volume. Fig. 1: Three depictions of the hieroglyphic sign TA in TT 74 (Tjanuny). © MANT IN SEARCH OF PAINTERS IN THE THEBAN NECROPOLIS 59 the systematic study of artistic practices and procedures, can allow us to track the artists who decorated the Theban tombs, and thus to reconstruct the ergonomics of such painting sites.7 The vast project we have only just begun8 is part of a general evolution of the Egyptological look at Ancient Egyptian painting. The history of the discipline still defines Egyptology today as a science deeply marked by philology. And, in this sense, the Egyptian image has often and for a long time been disembodied from its materiality and read as some sort of a set of hieroglyphs – in keeping with the conception that ancient Egyptians themselves developed about both their art and their hieroglyphic writing. The epistemological dimension of this epigraphic and documentary usage of Egyptian painting is admirably illustrated in the comparison made by Daniel Polz between two line drawings of the scene that adorns the passage of the front door of the tomb of Huy (TT 54): one that he made, the other, a copy of the same panel produced a few 7 The remarkable study that Betsy M. Bryan and her team have realized for TT 92 (Suemniwet) is based on the same principle: the description and analysis of the “technical process” highlighting, above all, variants of production or of decoration procedure: Bryan 2001 and McCarthy 2001. The same holds true for the observations of Nozomu Kawai (2004) in the tomb of Amenhotep III (WV 22). For a comparable study carried out on another type of decorated pharaonic objects – coffins of the 21st dynasty – and leading to analogous methodological conclusions, cf. Singleton 2001. Note in this sense the crucial significance of the understanding of the ergonomic organization of the work site, and in particular of the role of uploads/s3/ d-laboury-h-tavier-in-search-of-painte.pdf