King Ahmose I

The piece of art that is the being discussed in this paper is the relief sculpture of King Ahmose I. The sculpture is dated to around 1550-1525 B.C making it from the New Kingdom and is only identified as being from Egypt. The entire sculpture is made completely of limestone and has dimensions of H. 56 cm; 36.2 cm. It is currently being displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Gallery 131 with an inventory number of 2006.270. The relief sculpture is only partially complete, which can be attributed to the fact that limestone is a very soft stone, easily chips and is easily scratched, but still has a lot of its features left. The eyes are huge and seem to be looking at everything. The eyebrows are defined very thickly and go past where the eyes end. This feature could be something that was usually done with makeup as was usual in ancient Egypt. The mouth was sculpted to have a small smile making the sculpture a rather nice image to …show more content…
While at the metropolitan I saw other sculptures that were made of much better material and survived time mostly intact. While considering the softness of limestone it made me realize that its softness was also what could have attracted the artist. Limestone is easily manipulated and that was probably what the artist considered important. Technique wise it is very Egyptian in the way that the artist portrayed the Pharaoh’s features and showed a great amount skill because of how smooth and well done it would have looked when it was complete. One stylistic feature that is represented here is definitely the eyes. For some reason large eyes was something that I observed quite a lot in Egyptian paintings and sculptures. Another stylistic feature would be the overall size of the sculpture. Egyptians always made Pharaohs and god’s life size or larger than life size in order to show their importance compared to normal