Day 10 – U6 next stop: Ancient Egypt

Munich may be best known for beer, sausages, and Oktoberfest, but in my book the city scores even higher on the scale of all things visual art.  Five different large museums (three of them called “Pinakothek”) cover art from the Renaissance to today. And then there are the specialty museums that cover other eras and areas. And that’s just for the stuff called “Kunst” – obviously, the Deutsches Museum caters to a whole other range of interests, as does the Spielzeug museum or the more regionally/historically oriented Bayerisches Nationalmuseum.

So, among the many art options to choose from, for our excursion today we picked the Egyptian Museum. We had, as Arthur would say, “reasons, hooman, reasons!”—among them the fact that it was recently redone, had all sorts of fabulous multimedia interactives, and of course: it’s Egyptian! Pharaohs!! Sphinxes!!! Animal headed gods! It doesn’t really get much better.

I’ll now add some pictures, before I go into details which might bore you to tears… so feel free to stop reading  😉

As Egyptian culture changed relatively little over the extensive time period of ancient Egyptian history, the cumulative effect of art production means we have large numbers of surviving examples despite destruction due to natural and ideological factors. However, the massive number of objects created is probably mostly due to what looks like an obsession with preparing for the afterlife. The permanence of the afterlife required equally permanent materials—which is quite lucky for us, because they really did last (unlike the structures and goods for everyday life, which didn’t need to last forever).

The cool thing about the Munich Egyptian Museum was that they showcased both the continuity and the difference in (especially) Egyptian sculptures. From the typical poses and features (mostly very stiff and not anatomically correct, but idealized and “egyptically” correct), to the materials, to the way we would have seen these objects originally (in a niche, way up high, or in semi-darkness), it was great to wander through several thousand years of Egyptian art and history.

My favorite discovery by far was something I kind of knew (which is that there was a flexibility in their belief system which allowed for different gods going in and out of fashion, which also meant that the Greco-Roman gods could be integrated and that Christianity could appear as a continuation of a few previous divine representations – such as Isis and baby Horus providing a literal prefiguration for Mary and the infant Jesus), but then I’d forgotten or maybe never seen as many examples for just how much the old habits still stuck. Those habits create hilarious composites.  Much funnier than putting an animal head on a human body. I’m not sure who ended up having the last laugh or if it was seen as a perfect compromise, but the use of the veristic Roman portrait head in combination with the already at the time over two thousand year old Egyptian conventions of stance, attributes, support post and material—clashes fabulously with everything the Romans copied from the Greeks.  Winner: Old Kingdom.