For more than eight decades, the serenely beautiful likeness of Queen Nefertiti’s head has been the most celebrated exhibit in Berlin’s Egyptian Museum, attracting thousands of visitors and resisting all attempts at repatriation.
But a conceptual artwork involving the 3,300-year-old limestone bust and the body of a scantily clad woman has provoked outrage in the queen’s homeland and the accusation that Nefertiti is no longer safe in Germany.
The artwork is the brainchild of a Hungarian duo called Little Warsaw, and involved lowering the head of Nefertiti on to the headless bronze statue of a woman wearing a tight-fitting transparent robe.
A documentary of the encounter, together with the headless statue, will be the official Hungarian contribution to the Venice Biennale, which opens this weekend.
The Berlin museum’s director, Dieter Wildung, defended it as ”a homage to Nefertiti by means of contemporary art”, but in Cairo the artwork is regarded as a calculated insult to Egypt’s heritage and Islamic morals. ”We don’t agree with this, that the head of Queen Nefertiti should be subjected to an experiment by unknown artists, and could possibly be put in danger,” Mohamed al-Orabi, the Egyptian envoy to Berlin, said yesterday.
”In Egypt, people are very upset. The head is a national treasure.”
In Cairo, where censors remove pictures of naked bodies from imported foreign publications, there have been scandalised headlines about ”Queen Nefertiti naked in a Berlin museum”, while there have been jokes in the German press about ”prudish Egypt”.
But this is not just a clash over views of art or the representation of the female form, but over the attitude towards Nefertiti’s bust itself. In Berlin, the queen is affectionately dubbed ”Nofi” and her face features on postcards of the city, but in Egypt she is venerated.
The Egyptian culture minister, Faruq Hosni, has condemned the artists’ actions as ”unethical” and asked the foreign minister to make a formal protest.
The director of the Berlin museum yesterday described the row as a ”misunderstanding” and insisted that Nefertiti was in safe hands.
”The bronze torso actually met the Berlin bust only for a short moment,” Mr Wildung said in a statement.
”On May 26 [the torso] was united with the bust just for a few hours [in an] extraordinary moment of pure silence, without the public, exclusively under the eyes of the artists, the curator and the director of the Egyptian Museum.”
The bust of Nefertiti was unearthed early last century by the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt, who took it back to Germany, where it went on display in Berlin in 1922.
It was found during excavations at Amarna in Egypt, and is thought to have been made around 1350BC.
Egypt has frequently asked for the return of the bust but Germany cites a claim to the work based on a 1913 agreement that granted Nefertiti and a number of other priceless artefacts to their German discoverers.
Sun worshipper
· Nefertiti, queen of ancient Egypt, was wife of pharaoh Amenhotep IV and aunt of Tutankhamun
· Her husband broke with traditional gods and brought in monotheistic worship of sun’s disc, the Aten
· He changed his name to Akhenaten (servant of the Aten) and his wife’s name to Nefer-Nefru-Aten (beautiful is the beauty of the Aten)
· In early years of his reign she held prominent position in official art, which experts say may indicate she was power behind throne
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