Exhibition Lecture

The body was a hugely popular subject of representation in ancient Egypt. But this talk will look at the bodies in Egyptian art that we now don’t see–those of the ancient Egyptian audience. I will argue that Egyptian art worked in a fundamentally bodily way, engaging the senses of the viewer to create a powerful, reciprocal relationship between artwork and audience. This relationship sometimes worked in a manner that is simple for modern audiences to understand: the visual depiction of delicious foods or pleasant-smelling things, for example. But it also functioned in ways less familiar to our contemporary sensorium. Grand temple environments, scale, the use of pattern in non-royal tomb paintings, and even the popularity of three-dimensional bas-relief as a medium, were all designed to awaken tactility and especially proprioception, the sense of one’s body in space. The bodies depicted so multifariously in Egyptian art worked in tandem with the bodies of the audience that moved through and around them, creating a richly sensorial world in which art and audience worked together to actualize religious concepts.

Kathryn Howley is Lila Acheson Wallace Assistant Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She studies the art and archaeology of first millennium BCE ancient Egypt and Sudan, and is particularly interested in the material culture of intercultural interaction and identity. Dr Howley directs fieldwork at the Amun temple of King Taharqo at Sanam in Sudan, and is currently working on a new project on the use and reception of the body in ancient Egyptian art, in support of which she has received the Beinecke Fellowship of the Clark Art Institute and a Visiting Research Scholarship at ISAW.

This lecture is given in conjunction with ISAW's exhibition Rodin's Egypt. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue were made possible by generous support from the Leon Levy Foundation.