Those students that have matriculated through Art History I will remember the monumental architecture and statuary of Egypt’s Old Kingdom. The Cincinnati Art Museum will be mounting an exhibition on this period titled “Egypt in the Age of the Pyramids.”The collection is on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The exhibit will consist of over one hundred works of art, including statuary, stone relief carving, furniture, pottery, and jewelry. The exhibition will begin on March 17 and continue through June 9.
Many of the sculptural reliefs are from Giza, which was a center of funerary construction in the Old Kingdom. Several of the reliefs depict King Khafre and Menkaure, who both built pyramids at Giza.
A significant part of the exhibition is the actual story of how these treasures were unearthed. They were found during an architectural dig that lasted 40 years and was sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston. A narrated video and photomurals tell the exciting tale of these archeologists’ discoveries.
This exhibition enables the student to study the sculptural reliefs at close range instead of from the dusty pages of some art historical tome, and to immerse him/herself in a civilization so totally different from our own.