Portrait Head of Akhenaten

No one has ever described the almost life-sized portrait head of King Akhenaten more accurately than the German novelist Thomas Mann:

„In describing his face, the millennia must not make us shy away from appropriate comparison: that it resembled that of a young, aristocratic Englishman of somewhat degenerate lineage: elongated, arrogant and weary, the chin prominent, so certainly not lacking, but weak nonetheless, and dreamy, veiled eyes, with lids he was never quite able to raise, and so jaded that they contrasted alarmingly with the colour of the very full lips, which were not painted, but were of a naturally morbid, florid red.“

The head is a plaster cast from antiquity. The negative mould must have been made from a three-dimensional original. The dividing line between the two halves of the mould is clearly visible as a ridge down the centre of the face.

The original from which this ancient cast was made in the Amarna workshop of the sculptor Thutmose was probably a portrait of the king modelled in clay. As we can see from the colour highlights on the eyelids and eyebrows, the artist used the cast to work out details which would later be transferred to a stone sculpture. In the early years of the king's reign, the royal features were exaggerated to the point of caricature. But such caricature does not appear in this portrait, which probably dates to the final years of Akhenaten's 17-year reign.