Walking with the OG Sun King - Love, light, and rebellion in the fleeting art of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

 

How a heretic pharaoh, a queen with impossible cheekbones, and a garden stroll carved in stone make ancient Egypt feel startlingly modern.

Exhibition: Kunsthalle Bremen 2019

I can't remember the first time I met Akhenaten and Nefertiti. For the latter, it may as well have been her famous and in academic or diplomatic circles controversially debated bust that got me. Made of a limestone core covered in painted stucco, the bust is believed to be a modello and dated to around circa 1340–1345 BCE, during the Amarna Period. It is attributed to the sculptor Thutmose, who had a workshop at Tell el-Amarna. The bust was discovered on 6 December 1912 during excavations at Amarna by the German Oriental Society, led by Ludwig Borchardt. Today, she sits perfectly in state  — aloof, impossibly poised on a pedestal at the Neues Museum in Berlin. Everyone crowds her, phones up, mostly irreverent. 

Nonetheless, she has achieved worldwide cult status, whose very name - at least one of them - means "Beautiful is the beauty of Aten". As such, her image has been copied, reproduced, and even deconstructed - among others by Isa Genzken. 

In conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen in 2016, she discussed how she both “reveres, explores, and deconstructs” art history, mixing historical references with present-day symbols. She mentions rejecting traditional elite frameworks, wanting “topical” resonance, and bringing into her work questions about how beauty and value are constructed. The result: plaster reproductions of Nefertiti, who wear sunglasses and sit on a tall white pedestal. 

Her husband, Akhenaten, who has achieved fame as the world's first monotheist and father of Tutankhamun, has equally "had an extraordinary cultural afterlife" as Dominic Montserrat wrote (2003, 1). 

He "has been called a heretic, a false prophet, an incestuous tyrant by some, a loving, compassionate, peaceful precursor to Moses and Jesus by others" (Darnell and Darnell, 2022 XXI). For Nicolas Reeves, "Akhenaten stands alone. He looks different: his often freakish appearance in art - elongated and effete - is totally at odds with that of the traditional Egyptian ruler-hero" (2019, 8). 

Cyril Aldred (formerly the  Keeper of Art and Archeology in the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh) for example, was very keen on Amarna art. Yet, "believing that images of Akehenaten which seem to show him physically aberrant may be read literally, in the 1960s he developed the influential theory (first proposed in 1907) that Akhenaten suffered from a rare endocrine disorder, Fröhlich's Syndrome" (Montserrat 2003, 13). 

Fact is: "Akhenaten has been endlessly coopted by particular interest groups" [...] which makes it difficult to separate the different discourses from historical facts. Still, "he has survived because behind those recognisable features there is a space where conflicting desires - erotic, aesthetic, political - can be enacted and lived out" (Montserrat 2003, 183f). 

While peering into the faces of the ancient Egyptian rulers may have prompted people like Sigmund Freud to psychoanalyse the pair, I confess his ruminations on the Oedipal complex of a long-dead king have never really held much of my interest. 

What hooked me on a quiet day in the Neues Museum in summer was a piece tucked a few rooms away from the famous Nefertiti bust.  A carved limestone relief, fairly modest in scale, called The Stroll in the Garden. Represented are (if scholars are to be believed) Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who together, under the rays of Aten - the ancient Egyptian sun-disk, elevated by Pharaoh Akhenaten into the sole supreme deity. He leans toward her, she inclines toward him, their bodies attenuated and strange, yet somehow tender. The sun beams end in little hands offering life. 

Learning to Love the Strange

Egypt’s art is supposed to be eternal — rigid profiles, perfect bodies, gods that never age. But the Amarna period breaks that contract. Akhenaten decided to chuck 1,500 years of canon, invent a new god, and design a new art to go with him.

• In Berlin, colossal statues show the king with a narrow chest, swollen belly, and elongated skull — features that unsettle and fascinate in equal measure.

• In Munich’s Museum of Egyptology, fragments capture Aten’s rays descending like blessings on the royal family, their princesses climbing over laps and tugging at arms.

• In the Louvre, reliefs show foreign envoys carved with individuality, their faces expressive — something you rarely get in Egyptian art.

And then, of course, there’s Berlin’s own Nefertiti, cool as ice, balanced by the warmth of that garden stroll.

Between Love and Propaganda

I’ll admit: part of why I love Amarna art is its paradox. These seemingly intimate family moments were never private sketches; they were propaganda. The king kissing his daughter was a theological message — only through the royal family could Aten’s light reach the world.

But propaganda or not, it works - even 3.000 years later in a completely different setting. The gestures are too tender, the details too alive, to feel like pure politics. You recognize the glance of one partner toward another, the reach of a child for her mother’s hand. It’s human, at least to the eye of a 21st-century beholder. 

Whatever it is, Amarna art stays with you. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s strange, fleeting, and heartbreakingly alive.

References: 

• Montserrat, D. (2003). Akhenaten. Routledge.
• Darnell, J. and Darnell, C. (2022). Egypt’s Golden Couple. St. Martin’s Press.
• Reeves, N. (2019). Akhenaten: Egypt’s False Prophet. Thames & Hudson.

‌‌‌Further Reading: 

• The Pyramid Scheme: An Egyptophile's Wandering Through the Obelisks and Oddities of Paris