A Cat God, Mummy Coffins, and Spells for the Dead, in Texas

The Kimbell Art Museum, open for business, mounts a captivating show — Queen Nefertari’s Egypt — and leaves good questions.

A few months ago, I wrote about the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. It’s one of my favorite museums. It’s an eccentric place, of the loftiest and most luminous kind. It’s a small collection of the best of the best in art, paintings generally but also sculpture, largely European but some antiquities. Its 300 or so objects are displayed in a Louis Kahn building — both very modern and indisputably classical — in Fort Worth.

I like Fort Worth. It’s got cultural energy and zest, with three great museums I especially recommend: the Kimbell, the Amon Carter Museum, and the Modern Art Museum. I’ve never been to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, the museum dedicated to the women who built the West. I’ll write about it the next time I’m there.

I went to the Kimbell to see its new exhibition, Queen Nefertari’s Egypt, organized by the museum and the Museo Egizio in Turin, probably the best museum outside Egypt for the study of its antiquities. The Kimbell does lots of highlights shows from other institutions. Last June, I wrote about its show of Neapolitan Baroque painting from the Capodimonte in Naples.

Usually, I don’t like highlights shows. They’re often lazy assemblies of what are called treasures, with no pedagogical theme or intellectual merit. They raise cash by dropping names like “Louvre,” “Prado,” and “Vatican.” The “treasures” often include a few heavy hitters, but most are bush-league stuff that lives in the vault most of the time.

In Queen Nefertari’s Egypt, the museum in Turin did indeed send its best. It’s beautifully done, as are all the Kimbell’s shows. Visitors don’t learn an enormous amount about Nefertari in walking through the show, or about the museum in Turin, or about the royal court, but there’s only so much space. The catalogue, produced by the Museo Egizio, fills in the blanks.

I loved seeing so many people in the show, all masked and observing the distancing our masters prescribe, but still enjoying life and the Kimbell, the treasure at their doorsteps. Texans didn’t fight in the Alamo to cower in fear under the covers.

We learn from the show, speaking of gods and goddesses, that Nefertari was one of the most celebrated queens of ancient Egypt and the favorite wife of Pharaoh Rameses II, who ruled from 1279 to 1213 b.c. Little was known about her until the director of the Museo Egizio, Ernesto Schiaparelli, excavated her tomb near Luxor in 1904. Though the tomb had been raided and mostly emptied, probably at a time when the pharaohs still ruled Egypt, what remained was gathered, sent to Turin, and studied. Egyptian rulers, as we know from Tut’s tomb, lived the high life but didn’t go bargain-basement in death. Tut ruled about 50 years before Rameses, who is from a different dynasty, but the two were probably related. Nefertari surely went to the Afterlife in style, with all the trimmings a great royal would want.

Though our picture of her life and times is spotty, it’s now clearer simply from the findings in her tomb. The most extraordinary and instructive are wall paintings and hieroglyphics, which aren’t in the show but still in the tomb. We know from research stimulated by Schiaparelli’s discoveries that she was well-educated and highly admired. Egyptian empresses also had hidden power simply by access to the pharaoh. During the time of Rameses and Nefertari, however, Egyptian religious belief was more inclined than ever to see the pharaoh and empress as intermediaries between our world and that of the gods.

Excavations by Schiaparelli at Deir el-Medina, a nearby village, also transformed Egyptology. There lived the craftsmen and construction team that built and filled the tomb. Their own tombs, though simple, have unusual though unsurprising flair. They were, after all, the best of their kind, hired by the top of the heap. There are objects in the show from that dig, too, teaching us something about the daily life of the 99 percent.

Queen Nefertari’s Egypt is mostly a lifestyle and archaeology exhibition but also a show of art, though ancient Egyptians thought of art only as a tool of ritual. Whistler and his art-for-art’s-sake revolution would have found no takers. Egyptian style over the centuries was mostly static, evolving only when ritual changed, new materials or technologies appeared, or foreign style tweaked old traditions. Painting and sculpture styles are either frontal or axial and sized hierarchically. No one gets to frolic free-form. Space is almost always flat. Poses and gestures have specific, prescribed meanings rather than casual, nuanced, or personal ones.

It’s a different aesthetic, linear, abstract, and direct, with hieroglyphs being a big part of design in addition to messaging. Early in the show, a four-foot-tall sculpture of Rameses II seated between two gods, made of granite, shows the basic style. The objects aren’t all from Nefertari’s time. A handsome, six-foot-tall grandiorite sculpture of a seated pharaoh, with a smile, is possibly Thutmose I, who lived about 200 years before Nefertari.

There’s no lack of flair. The statue of Keret, from between 1425 and 1390, shows a crouching figure designed to resemble a boxy block for writing. It looks like Art Deco style, which is, after all, related to the Egyptomania craze that the Tut tomb stimulated after its fanfare founding in 1923. A 17-inch carved-wood sculpture of a woman is beautifully made from a single piece of dense wood. It balances striated surfaces like her sleeves and hair against smooth, polished surfaces like her clinging robe. It’s as sleek as an Academy Award.

After a while, like eyes adjusting to darkness, ancient Egyptian design becomes clearer and even legible. A sandstone grave stela, a slab that looks like a tombstone, dates from 1300 and isn’t too hard to read. The top register — it gets the rounded space on top — shows the deceased presenting two gods with a lotus offering. Below is a register with the deceased and his wife receiving an offering from their son, dressed in a panther skin. He’s followed by three figures and, continuing in the bottom register, six processing figures holding flowers. The hieroglyphs tell the story, but those of us limited to our ABCs can figure it out based on hierarchy and clothing.

The exhibition introduces us to Egyptian gods. Bastet, often depicted in the form of a cat, was the goddess of domestic joy, love, dance, and music. Taweret, shown sometimes as a rhinoceros with a crocodile’s tail and lion’s paws, is the goddess of maternity. Hathor is the goddess of rebirth in the afterlife. These goddesses are introduced early, I believe, because the show is about empresses. There’s a big section on the cosmetics, hairstyles, perfumes, and jewelry women used, developed from objects found mostly in tombs near Deir el-Medina.

Almost everything in the exhibition was discovered in excavated tombs and made over a 300-year period including Rameses’s reign and either side of it, though some things are a thousand years after Nefertari’s time. That what we know and have mostly comes from tombs might seem to magnify the significance of the afterlife in Egyptian culture, but, in fact, we can’t magnify it enough. Egyptians were very serious about it. The Hereafter, as they called it, was, after all, eternal rather than the few years most slobs spent living in huts.

The exhibition shows a papyrus of the Book of the Amduat, a lengthy and handy explanation of what happens to the royals after they die as they travel to the spot where their hearts are weighed to determine whether or not they’re pure enough to enter the kingdom of Osiris, the god of the dead and of resurrection. I did some research on this book afterwards. Having a Cliff Notes version in the label rather than just the papyrus would have demystified the steps the dead would take.

Another papyrus, the Book of the Dead of Hor, is from between 332 and 30 b.c. — which, at the tail end, is the time of Cleopatra. Reading more about it after the show, I learned this book is filled with spells and incantations to speed the dead along. It’s beautifully illustrated, too. I wish we’d learn more about these spells and incantations. I don’t know about you, but I could use some.

I enjoyed a big gallery of mummy coffins owned by the museum in Turin and found in the neighborhood of Nefertari’s tomb. Most are from the 25th and 26th dynasties, or 722 to 525 b.c., hundreds of years after Nefertari’s time, but they were worth seeing. The lighting in the space was dark. I know, the paint on the coffin surfaces is light-sensitive and this was necessary, but the intricate design was hard to see.

A large room is devoted to the tomb of Nefertari. It wasn’t exactly hoovered by grave robbers, but little was left. There’s a nifty model done after the Schiaparelli excavation that shows the sequence of rooms but also what must be the highlight of the tomb: gorgeous, life-size wall paintings covering every surface. Some are represented in the show in wall panels, so we have a taste. I sometimes, I think, erred on the side of Busby Berkeley in my sense of exhibition design. Substance is all-important, but a little “live the royal tomb experience” would have been nice. I would have re-created a space scaled to a room in Nerfertari’s tomb with high-quality, life-size panels decorating the walls to give visitors an immersive experience.

Nefertari’s pink-granite sarcophagus lid is there, or what’s left of it. Robbers left some shabtis, or small figures of mummies holding farming or irrigation tools. These signify the workers Nefertari needed to keep her necropolis fed, dated, and bathed. What we think are parts of her mummified legs were found. They’re in the show. They have nothing on Betty Grable’s legs, but I thought they were riveting.

I didn’t have a sense of the importance of Rameses II until I did some reading after seeing the exhibition. He was the most revered and consequential of Egypt’s pharaohs during its zenith of power. He was the most aggrandizing of emperors, vastly expanding Egypt’s empire through conquest and bullying. His mummy is at the Egyptian Museum. Living and loved during the height of Egypt’s monument craze, he’s the subject of sculptures ranging from the precious to the titanic. The four famous side-by-side colossal sculptures at Abu Simbel, for instance, depict Rameses. Though there’s no archaeological evidence, Rameses might have been the pharaoh during the Exodus. Nefertari was by his side during an epoch as rich, powerful, and expansive as Augustus’s, Charlemagne’s, and Louis XIV’s.

It’s a very nice show. People will learn plenty about ancient Egypt. I wanted to learn more about the Museo Egizio in Turin, but a thorough story of the place is in the catalogue. Christian Greco, its director, wrote two good essays, one on the importance of funerary beliefs in Egypt and another on the museum and how it got its antiquities. These were illuminating.

Knowledge of ancient Egypt was rudimentary until Napoleon’s invasion in 1798.

Napoleon brought a contingent of scientists, artists, and archaeologists with him, not entirely to plunder but to record and to discover. In 1799, a French engineer found the Rosetta Stone, for instance. Napoleon’s campaign might have failed, but it stimulated a rage for all things Egyptian among French designers as well as academics.

The Museo Egizio started with a big collection of Egyptian art and artifacts developed by Bernardino Drovetti, born in northwestern Italy but serving as a French bureaucrat in Egypt during Napoleon’s time there and afterwards. His collection made its way to Turin in the 1820s and is the museum’s foundation. Schiaparelli became the museum’s director in 1894. What began as a mission to fill gaps starting in 1903 hit the jackpot when a member of the local criminal class in Luxor suggested a spot where Schiaparelli might want to dig. Thus was found the Valley of the Queens. The neighborhood was used for tombs from around 1530 to 1075 b.c.

Schiaparelli’s haul legally went to Turin. Possibly the Kimbell didn’t want to get into it. Crazy people might cry “colonialism,” and the craziest will assume that an American museum showing these objects is complicit in a crime against humanity. Now that I think of it, where are those spells and incantations?