Fragment of a Queen's Face

Only the mouth and chin survive, carved in honey-yellow jasper and polished to a soft sheen - yet the fragment is the more haunting for being a fragment. Stripped of the rest of the face, the full, sensuous lips and their faint knowing smile gather an intensity the whole statue might have diffused; what time has broken away seems only to deepen its power. It belongs to the Amarna period, the radical reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who overturned Egypt's old gods and its frozen artistic conventions alike. The sitter was a royal woman, perhaps Nefertiti or one of her daughters, once inlaid into a composite statue of several different stones.