Statue of a Ptolemaic King
Unknown · Ptolemaic period, c. 332-30 BC
A king stands in the pose Egyptian sculptors had used for two and a half thousand years: left foot forward, arms at his sides, the striped nemes headcloth on his head with the cobra at the brow, and the pleated shendyt kilt around his hips. The statue is broken off above the knees, and the dark basalt is polished to a deep shine. Look at the face: the full cheeks, the rounded chin and the soft, slightly smiling mouth are features of the last centuries of pharaonic art, and the modelling of the torso, with its gentle swell of chest and stomach, borrows something from Greek sculpture.
The king is one of the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt from Alexander's conquest in three hundred and thirty two BC until the death of Cleopatra, and who had themselves portrayed as traditional pharaohs for their Egyptian subjects. No inscription survives to say which one. The statue was found in Rome at the Villa Albani, where the cardinal's celebrated collection of antiquities included Egyptian works brought to Italy in antiquity, and it entered the Louvre in eighteen sixteen.
Did You Know? Long before it reached Paris the statue stood in a Roman villa, one of many Egyptian pieces the Romans themselves carried to Italy.
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