Nefertiti: The Face Under the Plaster

Nefertiti was the principal wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE, and almost nothing she did survives in her own words. What survives in quantity is her image. Its most famous version is a painted bust found in the ruins of a sculptor's workshop at Tell el-Amarna on 6 December 1912, by an excavation led by Ludwig Borchardt and paid for by the Berlin patron James Simon.^[1]

For a century that bust has served as the picture of an ancient Egyptian beauty ideal: a long neck, a smooth and unlined face, dark outlined eyes, arched brows and a painted mouth. It is worth knowing what kind of object it is before treating it as a record of a face.

The bust came from a house the excavators numbered P 47.2, later attributed to the sculptor Thutmose. Finds were then divided between Egypt and the excavators, and at the division of 20 January 1913 the bust went to the German share. Simon bequeathed the Amarna finds, the bust among them, to the Berlin museum in 1920.^[2]

A workshop is a place where images were made, not a place where anyone was observed. The paint on the bust is the royal workshop's rendering of a queen. It records a chosen ideal first, and only indirectly anything a woman put on her face.

In 2009 a team at the Charité hospital in Berlin published a computed tomography study of the bust. The stucco on the face and ears proved to be very thin, one to two millimetres at most, laid over a carved limestone core.^[3]

The core is not a blank. The inner face was, in the authors' words, delicately sculpted, and it differs from the outer one in the angles of the eyelids, in creases around the corners of the mouth cut into the limestone, and in a slight bump on the ridge of the nose. The authors read those differences against the beauty ideals of the Amarna period, as signs of individualisation that the finish adjusted.^[3]

The dark line around the eye and the arched brow belong to a real Egyptian practice. Black eye paint was in wide use, and analysis of Egyptian kohl has found lead compounds that are rare in nature and appear to have been made deliberately.^[4] Green malachite and red ochre were ground as well, and palettes, pots and applicators survive in large numbers.^[5]

What the bust cannot say is whether its sitter wore any of that, on which occasions, or in what quantity. Paint on a sculpture is a convention of representation, and Egyptian artists painted eyes and brows on figures of every kind. The overlap between the conventions of the image and the habits of the dressing table is real, but it has to be argued from the material evidence, not read off the bust.

Whether Nefertiti wore the face the bust shows. The bust was found in a workshop, not a tomb or a palace, and its paint is the workshop's.^[6] The CT study establishes how the object was built, and that its sculptor worked a detailed face into the stone before finishing it in plaster; it makes no claim about the queen's skin.^[7]

What can be said is narrower and more interesting. The single most influential image of an ancient Egyptian face was smoothed on purpose by the people who made it. The ideal had an editor from the start.