It’s been a dozen years since the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s last blowout show of audience-pulling ancient Egyptian art. And the gorgeous and seductive “Divine Egypt,” which opens on Sunday, feels, for that reason, like a major return-to-office event, with a large contingent of corporate celestials on hand to greet us. Some are familiar, others we may be meeting for the first time.
It’s a big show. With more than 200 objects, many from the Met’s empyreal collection interspersed with A-1 international loans, it fills the rangy second-floor galleries recently occupied by “Sargent and Paris.” Yet it’s not the kind of monumental power-art display — Dendur-ish, pharaoh-intensive — that gatherings of this material tend to be. The emphasis here is less on political might than on spiritual intimacy.
Not that there isn’t plenty of power on hand. The divinity alluded to in the exhibition title consists of a panoply of ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses, all executive directors of the cosmic enterprise called Eternal Life. Some two dozen of them directly address us, though not as a boardroom-style ensemble.
The exhibition, organized by Diana Craig Patch, curator in charge of Egyptian art at the Met, and Brendan Hainline, research associate, has been designed as a kind of open-plan succession of individual spaces, each devoted to a single god. So we meet them one by one, in their offices — chapels? — where they reveal themselves fully, as personalities, with the quirks, contradictions and surprises that implies.
One surprise, or shift in expectations, arrives right at the start. We’re met at the show’s entrance by a modestly monumental sculptural portrait, on loan from the Louvre, of two figures: the solar god Amun-Re and the pharaoh Tutankhamen. From a contemporary perspective, “King Tut” is the clear celebrity; huge, a rock star, box office gold. But in this sculpture he stands, tiny as a toddler, between the knees of a deity who barely seems to notice him.
And even when figures are near the same physical size, divinity dominates. In a magnificent dark sandstone carving of the goddess Hathor sitting enthroned beside a king named Menkaure, the goddess is, if only slightly, the larger presence, and she wears by far the Gucci-er crown, one composed of tapering cow horns framing a cushiony yellow disc, the sun.
Dating from the second millennium B.C., and borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Hathor’s is one of the earliest known images of the goddess and the centerpiece of what amounts to a mini-exhibition devoted to her.
She was a very big deal for a very long time, with temples built in her honor, a female committed to her service, and a passel of other goddesses — Isis was one — adopting aspects of her multivalent “look.” In human guise Hathor was a promoter of motherhood; incarnated as a lioness or serpent she was a fierce protector of her devotees. In bovine form she was a central player in the cosmic creation, balancing the sun on her head and bringing light to a newborn world.
And in a selection of objects on view we see these aspects of her materially embodied: in a minute figure etched on a stone seal; in a face, half-human, half beast, on the handle of a musical instrument; and in a life-size carving in milk-white alabaster of a cow’s head. And several of her manifestations are depicted together in a bulky sandstone statue, in which all the faces have been worn down by the touch of worshipful hands.
This section sets the template for others devoted to individual deities that follow. Most are, like Hathor, multitaskers and shape-shifters, though not all.
The goddess Maat, routinely depicted as a serene and youthful beauty, is primarily defined by a set role and a signature emblem: a single feather worn, upright, in her hair. Maat — the name means “right” — is guardian and adjudicator of moral concepts like truth and social justice. Her job is to sort us all out by our adherence to those ideals. In the afterlife she places her feather on one side of a balance scale and our hearts on the other. We can hope that their weights will prove equal.
Like her, the sky god Horus is pretty consistently depicted in just one way, as falcon or falcon-headed man. (The show has a charming limestone carving of him in man-bird guise enthroned beside a pharaoh named Haremhab, who smiles faintly, as if a little anxious, a little amused, like a subway rider stuck beside a kooky passenger.) Yet, overall, multiplicity is the rule and interspecies is the direction it takes.
Thoth, a lunar divinity, appears as an ibis in some cult images, and a baboon in others. The deity named Seth, who embodied both good and evil and was branded the “god of confusion,” is portrayed as a bad-dream hybrid of horned, snouted and forked-tailed beings.
Cobra-shaped immortals are plentiful, as are those who assume the features of crocodiles and hippos, approach-with-caution natives of the Nile. And goddesses with feline attributes — Bastet and Sakhmet are two — abound, audience favorites thousands of years ago just as they are in museums today.
Because so much ancient Egyptian art survives in funerary contexts we’re inclined to think of the culture that produced it as fundamentally morbid, mortality-obsessed. Yet the dominant vibe of the Met show is one of inextinguishable vivacity, even in the face of death.
This is fascinatingly illustrated in a portrait of the sky goddess Nut painted, half-life-size, on the inside lid of a coffin made for a woman named Wedjarenes. Nut is shown young, strapping, and all but nude, with limbs outstretched as if she were shooting hoops. Sure enough, an orange sphere like a basketball hovers above her head and another, smaller, sits between her thighs. Why? Because she swallows the sun each night and gives birth to it again each dawn, in a cycle of regenerative refreshment that the coffin’s occupant would have experienced through eternity.
Eternity, as an active, thriving state, is what much of this art is about, and that state was available to all. True, access to monumental sacred works of the kind we see in our museum collections was restricted to the patrician and priestly classes. But there also existed a vibrant popular religion, producing images to be enshrined on home altars and paraded out in the streets on barque-shaped processional floats. (A simulation of such a float, bearing a cargo of small sculptures, is in the show.)
And when it came to crossing the fluid line between this life and the next the basic drill was the same for everyone. You are guided into the next realm by the equivalent of an emotional support animal, a jackal-headed service dog, slender as a Saluki, named Anubis. (There are fabulous images of him here.) And he leads you into the presence of that most charismatic of all divinities, Osiris, the forever ruler of Egypt and lord of the afterlife.
Osiris makes multiple appearances in the show’s final gallery. In most he is seen wearing what for him is the equivalent of a business suit: head-to-foot mummy-like white bandaging. (There’s a back story: Osiris’s brother Seth, pathologically jealous, killed and dismembered him; Osiris’s sister and wife, the goddess Isis, bound his body back together and restored him to life.) Yet the most striking image of him, a final exhibition highlight, is quite different.
Here Osiris is one of three figures in a free-standing cast-gold group stationed near the end of this much-welcome back-to-work show. Together they constitute an exit version of a meet-and-greet, and a top-brass goodbye team they certainly are. The falcon-headed Horus, Osiris’s and Isis’s son, stands at danseur noble attention to the great god’s right. On his left the sun-crowned Isis strikes an attitude of well-practiced professional poise.
But Osiris himself, a managerial wild-card type who doesn’t fit into 9-to-5 orthodoxies, is not standing. He’s seated, knees drawn up toward his chin, atop a square column. He’s crowned like a king, but looks like a kid, small, narrow-shouldered, big-eared, his face old for a youth, young for an oldster. And he stares straight out with what? curiosity, puzzlement, wonder?
All natural reactions to this entrancingly charismatic show.
Divine Egypt
Opening Sunday through Jan. 19, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., (212) 535-7710; www.metmuseum.org.
Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic and a senior writer for the Culture section of The Times, where he has been on staff since 1998.
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