Message #136507

[Bianca]

When Salt's 10 fragments arrived at the British Museum in 1821, the museum was still at Montagu House. It was more than a decade before the pieces were consolidated with plaster of Paris and backed with wood so as to form part of the collection of the "Egyptian Saloon" in the grand new British Museum building, where they were hung in 1835. Not only were the panels displayed as individual paintings, but there was no indication that they came from the same tomb-chapel. The catalogue listed them as "...fresco paintings chiefly illustrative of the domestic habits of the Egyptians". They were certainly not rated as fine art.

Unfortunately the wooden backs forced the evaporating moisture from the plaster of Paris to the face of the paintings, and some of the colours and details faded and even disappeared. This is clear from comparisons with tracings made of the paintings at some point after their arrival.

During World War I the paintings were placed in secure rooms, but in 1918 they were moved with other antiquities to the safety of the London Underground. They spent most of World War II in a quarry in Wiltshire in the southwest of England, but sadly the vibration of the train journey they endured caused some crumbling... and more plastering, and even glue and nylon repairs, and further discolouration.

The paintings were displayed separately in the museum, some in the Third Upper Egyptian Room and some in the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. In 1997 they and other antiquities in the Egyptian galleries were removed from display to make way for major alterations that included the construction of the Great Court. This hiatus was timely, and museum curators used the opportunity to carry out a complete and painstaking restoration of the paintings.

While the paintings are being meticulously restored in the British Museum laboratories, let us turn our attention to the other father in our epic. Michel Mourad Cohen was a member of a Sephardic Jewish family from Aleppo in Syria who lived with his British wife, Sonia Douek, in Egypt, where their son Ronald was born. The family fled to England amidst the anti-Jewish sentiment in the aftermath of the Suez War, and there Ronald excelled at school and eventually became president of the Oxford Union and co-founder of the adventure capital firm Apax Partners. Among other interests Apax has supported the Middle East Peace initiative by funding Palestinian entrepreneurial activities.

Sir Ronald Cohen became a trustee of the British Museum in 2005. The Michael Cohen Gallery, which he and his third wife Sharon Harel-Cohen financed through the R and S Cohen Foundation, is dedicated to the memory of his father Michel.

"This whole gallery is about a son paying homage to his late father," the gallery's curator Richard Parkinson told Al-Ahram Weekly. "Nebamun's son can be seen making offerings to his dead father."

This sense of respect, even reverence, pervades the Michael Cohen Gallery in Room 61. A lowered false ceiling suggests the proportions of the original tomb, with a faint blue light from above indicating the brilliant desert sky. The walls are of French limestone, chosen because it was the closest match in colour and texture to the limestone of the Luxor hills. The paintings are arranged to evoke a visit to the tomb- chapel as would have been made 3,500 years ago. However, while past visitors would have come to admire the paintings, the objects depicted would have held little mystery for them. To help modern visitors visualise the scenes, similar items have been placed nearby. These concrete images help one understand objects people in the past would have known in reality. All the exhibits are contemporaneous with the paintings, and most come from Thebes, while others are from Amarna. They include wine jars, furniture, utensils, cosmetic spoons, jewellery, and even baskets and shoes. One prized piece is an opaque glass fish, probably tilapia, from the Amarna excavations . "We are very happy with the balance of information," Parkinson says. "The objects draw on the same information as the paintings and give a visual reality."

Like most artefacts preserved from ancient burials, the objects were owned by wealthier members of society. "We shall never know exactly what [life] was like," Parkinson says. "We especially don't know about the everyday lives of ordinary people. The lives of the wealthy are remembered."

Indeed, the scenes of Nebamun overseeing the temple's property, as dictated by his position, show how he spent his working day and how he wished to be remembered. The most alluring aspects of the paintings, however, are the scenes showing how Nebamun spent his leisure time hunting in the marshes and of birds, animals, plants and butterflies. One can only wonder at what went through d'Athanasi's mind when he first saw them, but he seems to have decided for himself which sections to take and what to leave behind. "We think they went for things that would appeal to the English taste -- feasts of food, fluffy animals, and gardens," says Parkinson in his illustrated book, The Painted Tomb-Chapel of Nebamun, which is available in Cairo.

The paintings would surely have drawn an audience in their day, even if the scenes might have been interpreted slightly differently by ancient admirers. "It was about the joy of life," Parkinson says. "But is the texture of the animals that sets them apart from similar paintings. These are the best- preserved butterflies from ancient Egypt." The prancing horse is one of the best known images of its kind, but the scene- stealer is Nebamun's ginger cat, seen busily catching his own birds.

Visitors to Room 61 can see the art as if hung in a gallery, much as Nebamun's contemporaries did. The idea, Parkinson says, is "to put them back into context and display them as works of art... comparable to Renaissance masters. We encourage people to look at them as paintings." They are accordingly displayed as though built into the tomb walls. The gallery contains 10 to 20 per cent of the original tomb paintings. One small fragment is on permanent loan from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, while the pieces in France were considered too fragile to travel. "We have tried to reconstruct the original tomb visit of ancient times," Parkinson says. "We have had constant dialogue with Egyptian and other archaeologists but we have no idea of the tomb's original place." So the setting is a result of intelligent approximation.

Despite their painful history the colours are incredibly vivid, although some blue and green pieces had fallen off because the pigments were more coarsely ground than others. The paintings are mounted in epoxy foam set in wooden boxes in steel frames on springs to protect them from vibration, and all the mounts are concealed inside the climate-controlled cases. "It was an engineering nightmare," Parkinson says.

And worth every effort. "We wanted to get something of what it was like to be an Egyptian looking at these paintings, and to give back to the paintings what was taken from them when they were taken away." Perhaps at last, and in a way they could never have imagined, Nebamun and his gifted artist have reached immortality.

 


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