Hatshepsut Analysis

While at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I entered the Egyptian wing which is a great place to be if you want to learn more about Egyptian art and the history. The subject of the art work is that for the ancient Egyptians, the ideal king was a young man in the prime of life. The physical reality was of less importance, so an old man, a baby, or even a woman who held the titles of pharaoh could be represented in this ideal form, as in this representation of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Although many of Hatshepsut's statues depict her as the ideal king, the inscriptions always allude to her feminine gender, sometimes by using both masculine and feminine grammatical forms, sometimes by including her personal name, Hatshepsut, which means "foremost of noble women." This statue was one of a pair that stood on either side of a granite doorway on the upper terrace of Hatshepsut's temple at Deir el-Bahri. The pose, with both hands open and resting on the front of the kilt, is a devotional gesture that was first used in statues of the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senwosret III who lived …show more content…
The outlines in the base of the figure underneath the feet is very smooth and clear. In my opinion, the main lines in this piece are diagonal, vertical, and horizontal based on what I see in the piece. There is space around the sculpture and in relation to the sculpture; it shows that Hatshepsut is walking in straight line but it also looks like she is walking in a narrow hallway. Hatshepsut is the main figure in the space because she is being showcased as someone of a high importance. The texture of the sculpture is smooth at the base but rough from Hatshepsut's feet up to her headdress. There are two textures which are both smooth and rough because Hatshepsut has a rough texture, but the base has a smooth