MILAN MILANO ITALY | VIA MONTENAPOLEONE PEOPLE & EVENTS | PEOPLE & EVENTS IN VIA MONTENAPOLEONE

Only she who holds the oar that commands the ship.
The sovereign of life, guide of the light on the beautiful streets (of the West),
Only she who fixes the cables to the helm …
Only she who possesses the winds of the isle of joy …
I am a port of peace for whoever practices justice.
A ferry for her elect, for she who creates the ship to ferry the just

The text talks about the goddess Hathor, protector of the West and the necropoli, the goddess of the sky who gives life to the deceased. Her likeness, always in profile, represented in the bottom of a sarcophagus, shows the profound union, an idyllic embrace, between the deceased and the goddess, in the hope of obtaining an existence beyond life. A woman whose role has even come down to us thanks to the wealth of symbology illustrated in hieroglyphics, the fascinating yet mysterious alphabet that incarnates and exalts the union between image and word.

In Egyptian civilization, every aspect of life and death is profoundly linked to the personification of a god who evokes extraordinary correspondences between the dominating forces of the creation and cosmological energies. Ever since its origins, the separation of male and female genders has been deeply rooted in Egyptian culture; the female is almost equal to the male and the divine female entities are the positive expression of the protection of life and the social order. The figure of the woman, in her polyvalent symbolic nature, is in close relation to the pharaoh through different roles of the first rank. Remembered with titles like mother, wife and daughter of the king, queen of upper and lower Egypt, her physical aspect always had to celebrate beauty: Nefer, the inevitable gift in the reign of the living as much as in the reign of the dead.

In fact, Nefer. La donna nell’antico Egitto (Nefer. Woman in Ancient Egypt) is the subject of a splendid exhibit in the Palazzo Reale in Milan. The superb sculpture, papyri, funerary accoutrements, as well as painted sarcophagi (some of which have never been on exhibit before), or the seductive ornaments that were typical of Egyptian fashion, like bracelets, earrings in the form of eggplants and rings of colored glass, immortalize the beauty of a civilization that is centuries away, but that lives again in this exhibit. The result is a tale of Egyptian life through woman in her many facets. From regality to the art of beauty, mother and Grand Royal Spouse, the epithet linked to Nefertari, She for Whom the Sun Shines.

There is also a wealth of titles that associate the female figure with animal forms. Among these, the most ancient is the guise of the vulture, a headdress adopted by the goddess Nekhbet, protector of Upper Egypt. A beneficent goddess and friend of whoever worked in the desert is Selkis, the scorpion goddess who defends her subjects from her sacred animal, whose bite was feared. Anukis is the goddess who adorns her head with gazelle’s horns, and whose memory is linked to the exuberant vegetation that the flooding of the Nile – also represented with the likeness of a god – causes each year.

The aspect of maternity, which is also linked to fertility and hence to birth is also of remarkable interest, as is witnessed by the delightful sculptural groups in the exhibit. Among these is Khent and His Small Nude Son Rudju, from Vienna, or the Group with infant girl from Turin, with its pictorial hues that make the statue lifelike, but at the same time eternal. This last element is emphasized by the eyes of personalities who are markedly open and headed towards eternity.

The hairstyles and perfectly described clothing in the statuary group from Munich, Neje and his Wife Mut-nofret, are a marvelous example of the section that talks about the Lady of the Home and hence of marriage in ancient Egypt. The message of extraordinary modernity that the message conveys to its visitors is woman as the Lady of Life, held in high esteem and mirror of the earthly viaticum that ends, but is at the same time eternal in marvelous sarcophagi and enchanting books of morals.

And if art has the supreme dignity of exalting beauty, in ancient Egypt it is congenial to life, and with it eternity is venerated: do not worry about tomorrow today, before it has come. Was it not that yesterday, like today, is in the hands of God?

credits
PALAZZO REALE
Piazza Duomo, 12
20121 Milano
Tel. +39 02 54919

DNART
via dell'Orso, 16
20121 Milano
Tel. +39 02 29010404
info@fondazionednart.it