With about 210 works included, “Divine Egypt” is the largest exhibition devoted to ancient Egyptian art in over a decade at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the venerable New York institution that is famous for its shows devoted to that area of art history. It’s an unusual kind of blockbuster, however, in which the smaller works steal the show away from monumental statues on loan from international institutions. (The Met itself owns around 140 of the pieces in the show.)
Curated by Diana Craig Patch, working with Brendan Hainline, the show explores how Egypt’s artisans depicted the 1,500 gods their people worshipped, focusing on roughly 25 of these deities. Across the amulets, sarcophagi, statues, and mummies surveyed, two things become obvious. One is that these gods were shapeshifters, in more sense than one, for their form changed depending on who was depicting them. Another is that the gods were just as strange then as they appear now.
Read a full review of the show here.
