Archaeology and art masterpieces do not mix.1
Professor Barry Kemp (2012)
In the early 1920s, before the Nefertiti bust was put on public display, Heinrich Schäfer, Director of the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin, commissioned Tina Haim-Wentscher to make a third, very accurate replica to accompany the two she had already produced for James Simon some ten years earlier. This she did working alongside the original, using callipers to take multiple measurements.2 For many years Haim’s interpretation of the Nefertiti bust served as the ‘model’ for all the replicas issued by the Gipsformerei, or replica workshop, of the Berlin Museum. Many of the myriad high-quality Nefertitis that can be found in museums world-wide are plaster casts of Haim’s sculpture; their paintwork replicates Haim’s own rather than the original’s.3 Other replicas, ever so slightly different in appearance, particularly in regard to their treatment of the eyes, are based on later models created either freehand or, more recently, from laser scans.4 In 2015 the most recent official model of the Nefertiti bust was created using modern scanning technologies that allowed accuracy to a tenth of a millimetre. Following a comparative analysis of the paint on the original bust, this model was painted using original pigments and traditional painting techniques. A rock crystal was used to create the right eye.
The Berlin Gipsformerei is a remarkable survival from a bygone age. Founded in 1819 by Friedrich Wilhelm III, it became a part of Berlin’s Royal Museums (now the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) in 1830. It was not unique: throughout the nineteenth century plaster-cast workshops were seen as a vital element in the museum structure, and all the major Western museums employed artists to create high-quality plaster replicas of the key pieces in their collections. These casts allowed museums to disseminate accurate information about their own collections while generating a useful income stream. The casts were sent to national and provincial museums, where they were either displayed in dedicated cast courts or placed on the galleries alongside genuinely ancient artefacts so that the unwary visitor must have struggled to differentiate between the real and the replica artefacts. Plaster casts were employed in school and university teaching, and were acquired as works of art in their own right by private individuals, some of whom amassed impressively large collections. While museums were unwilling to lend their ancient artefacts, fearing, perhaps, that their treasures would not be returned, they were happy to sell and exchange casts. When in 1798 Napoleon’s troops looted the Papal States and seized their artworks, the French offered plaster casts in compensation. The British Museum made casts of the Parthenon frieze available in 1819.5
The twentieth century saw a reaction against the displaying of ‘fakes’ in museums, which led to the closure of many of the cast courts and the dispersal or destruction of their collections. However, opinion has once again shifted, and today the original Victorian casts are appreciated both as works of art in their own right and as impressive technical achievements.6 While other museums have closed their replica workshops, the Gipsformerei continues to thrive with a staff of twenty-four highly skilled artists dedicated to creating hand-crafted, museum-grade replicas. The Gipsformerei is, however, far more than a commercial workshop. It has become an important historic archive holding almost 7,000 models and casts plus a collection of antique plaster moulds, some of which represent our only link to lost, badly damaged or over-restored artefacts.7
The traditional replica manufacturing process started with the creation of a plaster mould from either the original sculpture or, in the case of fragile or painted pieces such as the Nefertiti bust, an accurate model. As sculptures almost invariably include indentations and projections, this mould had to be created in several pieces. Next, the piece-mould was enclosed in an outer casing, the interior of the mould was washed with a separating agent to prevent sticking, and a high-quality plaster was poured in. Once the plaster had set, the cast was released from its mould and lightly sanded to remove the casting lines between the mould pieces. While some casts were simply polished, the Nefertiti bust had to be hand painted, with the artist not only copying the colours but also replicating all areas of damage. As they are all hand painted, no two Nefertiti replica busts can ever be exactly alike, and none can ever be exactly the same as the original. The Gipsformerei still uses the traditional piece-moulds to create replicas from high-quality plaster of Paris but this is a slow and expensive way of working, and new technologies have been added to the repertoire. Silicone moulds now allow the more rapid replication of more popular pieces, while structured-light 3D scans allow the manufacture of non-contact models using a 3D printer.
The Gipsformerei recreated several of the Amarna heads in plaster, but it was the Nefertiti bust which attracted most attention and which earned the most money. Initially, the bust was only supplied in the white, unpainted version. When a painted version did become available, it was possible to make requests such as the adding of the left eye. As the various replica Nefertitis spread out from Berlin, visitors were attracted in the opposite direction, intent on seeing the original of a piece that was already very familiar to them. By November 1924 a colourful, one-eyed replica was drawing crowds to the British Museum, where it was displayed alongside genuine artefacts in a wall-case in the Egyptian gallery. On 9 December 1925 The Times carried a brief paragraph: a subtle advert designed to draw visitors to Harrods store in London:
1,400 BC
It’s hard to realise there was a world at all then, but I did the other day when I saw at Harrods the reproduction of a painted limestone head of Queen Nefertiti. You should see this bust, for I hear it is one of the only two reproductions in the world today and has been specially lent to Harrods by a well-known Egyptologist.
Harrods Ground Floor
Lady Babs
‘Lady Babs’ was, of course, wrong; there were already many versions of the Nefertiti bust in circulation. She had even reached Lancashire. On 1 December of that same year George Carpenter, keeper of Egyptology and archaeology at the Manchester Museum, wrote to Thomas Midgley, curator of the Chadwick Museum in nearby Bolton, on precisely this subject. Midgley had been inquiring about a replica Nefertiti bust, which he had admired in the Manchester collection. Carpenter was able to advise him that the bust had been purchased from the Berlin Museum for £4 including reparations duty plus £2 5s 6d transport and insurance. The bust arrived in Bolton in February 1926, and its unveiling in the Chadwick Museum was reported in the local newspaper.8 After some confusion over reclaiming the war reparations, Midgely calculated that the replica had cost £3 8s 6d plus a reparation levy of 26 per cent and shipping charges. This was a good investment. As I write this in 2017 a hand-painted, life-sized Nefertiti bust created from the 2015 model can be bought from the Gipsformerei for €8,900 with a choice of plinth (light Persian shell limestone, or black granite); an unpainted version costs €1,290. When the Chadwick Museum closed in 1956 the Nefertiti bust was transferred to the new Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, where it was displayed alongside the genuine but unspectacular Amarna artefacts that represented Bolton’s share of the division acquired by the Egypt Exploration Society.
As a child I believed that the Haim replica in the Bolton Museum was a genuine antiquity. As a one-time museum professional who has spent many hours patrolling the Egyptology galleries in the Manchester Museum, I know that many museum visitors make this same mistake. The label may make it clear that the bust is a replica, but surprisingly few visitors read museum labels carefully. The replica looks old and slightly battered, and its presence within the museum – seen by many as an academically sacred space dedicated to truth – is confusing: we tend to assume that the things we are shown in museums are ‘real’. Aware of this, the Manchester Museum has recently gone from one extreme to another. Its Haim replica is now separated from the Egyptology collection, and is displayed in a case boldly and quite inappropriately labelled ‘Fakes’. In contrast the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as ‘Stan’ is still on display and is one of the museum’s most popular attractions. Few who visit the dinosaur in his gallery, or read about him on the museum’s website, are likely to realise that he is a plaster cast, and that the original Stan is housed in the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in South Dakota.
To some observers, it is the original Nefertiti bust that is the fake, commissioned by Borchardt and, perhaps, modelled on his wife Mimi.9 Swiss author and historian Henri Stierlin has developed an elaborate argument to support this theory, which has gained a surprising degree of acceptance amongst alternative Egyptologists and on the internet. In Stierlin’s version of events, the bust was created by sculptor Gerhard Marcks to test the use of ancient pigments. After it had been admired by Prince Johann Georg of Saxony, Borchardt did not feel that he could reveal its true nature without making the prince look foolish. He therefore sent the bust to Berlin with the genuine Amarna artefacts, and then tried very hard to persuade the museum not to put it on display. There is an element of truth in this tale. Prince Johann Georg and his wife Maria Immaculata did pay an unexpected visit to Amarna on 6 December 1912, with the prince later recording details of the visit in his diary. But the prince makes no specific mention of the bust:
The men had intended to excavate just one house where they suspected there might be some finds … Instead, a gentleman sent a note in the morning, before we arrived, that he believed he had found something interesting, and so it was. It turned out to be a sculptor’s atelier, where we saw around 20 well-preserved busts that had been dug out, among them some very valuable showpieces.10
Bolton sculptor Shaun Greenhalgh also feels that the bust is a fake, on the grounds that the selective distribution of the damage, which is observable on the ears, the back of the head and the uraeus but not on the nose, is incompatible with its being an ancient artefact. Describing Nefertiti as ‘a beautiful Edwardian lady, done up in Egyptian make-up’, he condemns the plaster exterior as the work of either an amateur or a second- or third-rate sculptor. The one surviving eye, however, he classifies as real; an ancient element added to a modern forgery to make it more acceptable to the experts. The fact that there is one eye rather than two is simply an indication that the forger could not source a pair.11
Greenhalgh, just one year younger than me, was another child inspired by the atmospheric Egyptian gallery in Bolton Museum. Our careers, however, took different turns. In 2006 Greenhalgh was revealed as the unlikely master-craftsman behind the ‘Amarna Princess’, a fraud that deceived the Egyptological world, and persuaded Bolton Museum to pay £439,767 for what was believed to be the broken yet still beautiful statue of one of Nefertiti’s daughters.12 The mechanics of the fraud were elegantly simple. Working in partnership with his parents, Greenhalgh obtained a copy of the 1892 unillustrated catalogue detailing the sale of the contents of Silverton Park in Devon. This included the tantalisingly vague description of a partial lot: ‘eight Egyptian figures’. After three weeks working in his shed, Greenhalgh had produced an Amarna-style female torso, closely modelled on an Amarna sculpture in the Louvre. His statue was dressed in a clinging, pleated garment, and the remains of a ‘sidelock’ hairstyle suggested that she was a princess rather than a queen. Greenhalgh had made his princess from calcite, using modern DIY tools; layers of tea and clay had been applied to give it the appropriate patina of age. Greenhalgh’s octogenarian father approached Bolton Museum armed with the statue (casually carried in a rucksack), the catalogue, and a (forged) letter supported his claim that the statue, bought from the sale by his mill-owning greatgrandfather, had been in the family for over a century. Stunned by the totally unexpected arrival of a seemingly genuine alabaster Amarna princess in her office, Bolton Museum curator Angela Thomas sought advice from the British Museum and, after close inspection, the statue was declared genuine. The princess – a fake by anyone’s definition of the word – stood with her true nature unrecognised alongside the slightly older replica Nefertiti bust and the considerably older Amarna artefacts for three years.
In 2006 the Greenhalgh family attempted to sell a group of Assyrian reliefs to the British Museum. These, too, had apparently come from the Silverton Park sale as documented in the 1892 catalogue. However, a close examination by an expert employed by Bonhams Auction House showed that the reliefs contained numerous stylistic errors. The Metropolitan Police were informed, and requested that Bolton Museum re-examine their princess. This re-examination revealed anomalies which could be considered within the bounds of acceptability when the statue had a firm provenance, but which became of far greater significance when that provenance was removed. There were oddities in the sculpting; the knot tying the dress under the right breast was not well formed; the neckline hem had a unique finishing; the left arm was disproportionately slender; and there was carving on the negative space by the left leg, which should not have been there as the negative space was not considered to be a part of the sculpture. The stone, too, was not quite right: it was a strangely homogeneous colour with air bubbles apparent in the weathering; it was soft enough to be damaged by a thumbnail and therefore unlikely to have lasted 3,000 years relatively unscathed; and it showed a curious wear pattern. The chances were that the princess was a forgery. The experts who declared it genuine had been distracted by its faked provenance, and had neglected to look at the piece itself.
When the ‘princess’ was impounded by the police, there was a mood of disquiet in Bolton. While no one argued that the fraud was a good thing – £439,767 is a huge sum of money that could have been used to safeguard other heritage items – there was a general feeling that the Greenhalgh sculpture represented a poor local boy beating the experts at their own game. Furthermore, it raised interesting questions. If the princess was beautiful enough to be purchased, put on display and admired by many hundreds of visitors, did she not retain that beauty when the truth was revealed? Or, as the ‘experts’ believed, did her beauty stem solely from her authenticity? To many Bolton residents, the history of the Amarna princess was as interesting and relevant, if not more interesting and relevant, as the history of the genuine pieces displayed on the museum gallery, because the princess had a direct link to Bolton. When in 2011 the princess returned to Bolton as part of the Metropolitan Police’s touring Fakes and Forgeries exhibition, she proved more popular than ever before.
Greenhalgh’s expertise as a forger of ancient Egyptian sculpture is unrivalled (or so museum curators like to think). However, his identification of the Nefertiti bust as a fake does not sit well with the various contemporary and near-contemporary written accounts of its discovery and the subsequent division. Not does it fit with the fact that the bust was recovered as part of a collection of similarly themed sculptures, including a companion bust of Akhenaten. It is not easy to date a stone artefact as one runs the risk of simply dating the stone, but the pigments used to colour the bust have been analysed, and have been found to be entirely consistent with later Eighteenth Dynasty usage. Finally, the recent CT scans, which have revealed the bust’s complex inner structure, tell us that the piece would have taken many hours to create. It is highly unlikely that a copyist, or even a dedicated forger, commissioned or otherwise, would go to so much trouble. We can therefore dismiss the suggestion that the bust is a forgery masterminded by Borchardt, and with it the equally elaborate conspiracy theory that sees the bust now on display as a replica created by Hitler. This theory, which is again perennially popular online, maintains that Hitler, wishing to form an alliance with the Egyptians, had a replica made to be presented to the country after Germany had triumphed in the Second World War. Unknown to the Egyptians, the real Nefertiti would have remained in Berlin. When the Neues Museum was emptied, the busts were stored in identical crates. Then, during the muddled aftermath of the war, the crate holding the genuine bust was lost, leaving the fake bust to be recovered by the Americans.
An additional complication is introduced to our story by the suggestion that, although the Nefertiti bust is a genuine antiquity, the small painted stela which topped Lefebvre’s list of finds, and which is now displayed in the Cairo Museum, is a fake. This theory has been discussed by Rolf Krauss, who has suggested that Borchardt had the stela manufactured to distract Lefebvre’s attention from the bust during the division.13 It is true that the stela is strikingly similar to an Amarna stela of unknown provenance in the Berlin Museum collection.14 Both stelae show the royal family – Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the three older princesses – sitting beneath the rays of the Aten. Both were presumably created as objects of private worship for the Amarna elite. It is therefore likely that, rather than one being a copy of the other, both were copied, somewhat loosely, from a model. Alongside a meticulous analysis of the scenes on both stelae, Krauss offers an anecdote recorded by the renowned linguist Adolf Erman, who taught Borchardt the cuneiform script in 1887–8:
[Borchardt] made a clay tablet which was completely akin to the authentic ones with the exception that it contained logarithms in cuneiform numbers. Borchardt put the tablet into a box with genuine tablets which were studied by the Assyriologist Peiser. The latter and a colleague were enthusiastic when they deciphered the tablet.15
The hoax was only halted when Borchardt confessed, leaving Peiser, who had been about to publish the text, angry and embarrassed. So could the Amarna stela have been faked by Borchardt, on site? Time and access to raw materials would be crucial here. The bust was discovered on 6 December 1912; the painted stela was discovered on 11 January 1913, lying behind house Q47.16, buried just beneath 20cm (8in) of sand. Krauss suggests that this left enough time for Borchardt to order and receive a plaster cast of the Berlin stela, and to have it replicated and then planted on site. However, he points out that for the deception to succeed, the workman who uncovered the stela, his foreman Abdulhassan, the expedition member who supervised Abdulhassan, and possibly Ranke, who entered the stela into the official dig diary, would all have to have been involved. This seems an awful lot of people to hold a very big secret.
Just how long would it have taken to create either the fake or the original bust? In order to get some idea of the enormity of the task, and to allow me to gain a better understanding of the manufacturing process in Thutmose’s workshop, my brother, Frank Tyldesley, valiantly offered to carve a replica Nefertiti for me. This was not to be an exact copy – that would have been impossible, as Frank could not work alongside the original bust – but it would be of equal size and a close likeness based on measurements taken from a model obtained via a 3D photocopy scanned from one of the official replicas cast from the Haim bust, and it would allow me to see Nefertiti again emerge from a block of stone. Frank is not a professional sculptor but an experienced amateur with an entirely different and time-consuming job; this meant that the hours available to work on his Nefertiti would be limited. And his access to authentic tools would be limited too. Although he worked by hand, Frank used modern, tungsten-tipped tools, primarily the chisel and the rasp. Thutmose’s workmen would have used stone, wooden, copper and bronze tools, and would not have had access to iron. The comparatively soft local limestone of the Berlin bust would have been easier to work then Frank’s Portland limestone, although it did contain some flint inclusions which may have made things more difficult.
Frank soon regretted his decision to use Portland stone for his Nefertiti bust. This is the best carving limestone available in the UK but, as quickly became apparent, it is not easy to work. The fact that London’s Whitehall Cenotaph is made from Portland stone gives some idea of its toughness and durability. Starting with a 195kg (430lb) block, it took Frank two months to chip the excess stone away, and it was three months before the block could be lifted onto his workbench. His experience makes it very clear why Thutmose and his men would chose work in the open courtyard, close by the compound gate. No one wants to move a heavy stone block more often than necessary, and even a relatively small block of stone is very heavy. Having chipped away at least three-quarters of it, and generated a significant pile of debris, Frank now has a block measuring 35 × 27 × 59cm (14 × 11 × 23in), which includes 10cm (4in) of base that will eventually be removed from the sculpture. In ancient Egypt, too, all statues started life as a stone block cut slightly larger than the desired end product. The extraction of a soft stone (limestone or sandstone) block from the quarry was a relatively simple procedure as the stone could be cut using copper tools. Hard stone blocks were an entirely different matter, as they were too hard to cut using saws and chisels. Evidence preserved in the Aswan granite quarries indicates that these blocks were separated from the mother-rock by teams of men rhythmically bouncing hammer-stone balls of dolerite (an even harder rock) against the surface, to wear it away.
For all sculptors, modern and ancient, planning is the key to success. Frank planned his work by drawing all four sides of the head onto a graticule, and using this as the basis for all measurements. Guidelines were transferred to the block, which was worked evenly all round, leaving the face until last. Thutmose, too, would have covered his block with a network of accurately measured guidelines; these would ensure that the statue did not distort or twist during its cutting. He would then have sketched the image – front, back, profile and top – onto the stone in black ink. Several of the unfinished pieces recovered from Thutmose’s workshop show these black guidelines. With the outline in place the stone could be cut away from all surfaces, with the guidelines being reapplied at frequent intervals to keep the statue true. Again, this would be a relatively quick and easy process when working with soft stone, and a time-consuming and difficult one when working with hard stone, which could only be cut using hammer-stones and drills employing a sand abrasive. Whatever the stone, Egyptian statues were rarely cut entirely free of their original block: arms tended to remain close to the body; stone was left in place between the legs and between the arms and the body; and most stone statues were supported by an integral plinth and back pillar. This, combined with the tradition of ‘frontality’ which dictated that royal and divine subjects always faced straight ahead without any noticeable bending or turning of the head or body, allowed the stone statues to develop a static dignity. Contemporary wooden statues, far lighter, and equipped with jointed shoulders which allowed the arms to extend and hold things, were able to achieve a more active, but perhaps less imposing, royal presence.
Nefertiti has taken a year of Frank’s life so far, working an average of half an hour per day, and he still has many hours to go. But he estimates that in a workshop, with experienced craftsmen, appropriate tools and the appropriate quality and quantity of limestone, the stone head could have been created in approximately six weeks. The plaster and paint would then be relatively quick additions to the original; it is the need to create an exact replica which makes this stage so slow in the Gipsformerei. Shaun Greenhalgh is a much faster worker; he reportedly took just three weeks to create his unpainted Amarna princess using modern tools and a very soft stone, but this is not a particularly relevant parallel, as his princess is a very different shape and, crucially, lacks the face that would require delicate modelling. The most surprising thing to come out of Frank’s work so far is the fact that, when struck with a hammer, his Nefertiti bust rings with the sound of a slightly muffled bell.
Inevitably, the Berlin queen – or for many who saw it in their local museum, Haim’s version of the Berlin queen – became the one and only popular version of Nefertiti. Defined by her flat-topped crown, she quickly passed into popular culture as a beautiful, powerful and exotic woman. This version of Nefertiti has for over a century been depicted in novels, plays, films and operas, and has even made an appearance in the BBC’s Doctor Who. Her image, often reduced to a silhouette, has been used to sell a wide range of luxurious, female-based products, from cosmetics and underwear to holidays. Occasionally it is the bust itself that features in popular culture; a replica Nefertiti bust, for example, plays a key role in Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest’s The Egyptologists (1965), and is featured on several versions of the book’s cover. Less successfully, a Nefertiti bust is displayed in the Cleopatra Club in Quentin Tarantino’s 2013 film Django Unchained. The film is set in 1858. Whether or not it actually existed, Nefertiti’s personal flat-topped crown has assumed a surprising cultural life of its own. In the 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein, Elsa Lanchester’s hair was subjected to a Marcel wave then stretched over a wire frame to create a modern version of Nefertiti’s crown: an iconic tall, dark tower with a white lightning bolt on each side. This has evolved into the hairstyle sported by the Lego Bride of Frankenstein today. Lanchester’s hairstyle was replicated by Magenta the castle maid, played by Patricia Quinn, in the 1975 film of the Rocky Horror Show.16
While many have drawn inspiration from the bust, using it to develop their own interpretation of Nefertiti the woman, some artists have regarded it as an object in its own right, and have been happy to isolate it from its original context. These artists may or may not have an understanding of the history underpinning the statue; some may regard that history as irrelevant. They do, however, all share a conviction that the bust should not be allowed to linger in the past; that it has to keep moving forward to survive as a culturally relevant object. This is a theme that has been repeated many times over the past century, with one of the first to express this view to a wide public being Madame Yevonde (Yevonde Middleton), a pioneer of colour photography who in 1938 used the now defunct Vivex colour process to create her still life Bust of Nefertiti with Flat Iron and Letters. In her photograph the bust appears an uncompromising, unpainted white, although her lips and cheeks are tinted and both eyes have been drawn in. The arms which hold the vivid yellow flat iron belong to a living woman hidden behind the bust.
Others have continued along this route. In 1993 American artist Fred Wilson created Grey Area (Brown version): five plaster replicas of the Berlin bust placed on high wooden shelves which force the viewer to look up, which the artist painted in various shades of skin tone ranging from oatmeal to dark chocolate.17 Here the bust represents one of the most copied artworks of ancient civilisation, while the five identical but differently coloured Nefertitis raise questions about the racial identity of the ancient Egyptians. In 2012 German artist Isa Genzken added sunglasses to seven painted Nefertiti replicas exhibited on white painted wooden plinths to create Nofretete. Her Nefertiti, an ancient icon of feminine beauty, is used to explore the place of women in art. Also in 2012, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath of the multidisciplinary cultural platform Art Reoriented created Tea with Nefertiti: The Making of the Artwork by the Artist, the Museum, and the Public. This was an exhibition of works by forty mainly contemporary artists displayed alongside works by ancient Egyptian artists. Using the Nefertiti bust as a metaphorical thread, they explored the ways in which exhibitions and artworks create images of other cultures, while examining the way in which a work of art may acquire different meanings when it travels through time and place.
The Neues Museum has always endeavoured to present Nefertiti in new and unexpected contexts. In the Altes Museum she had stood in splendid isolation:
Nefertiti was installed in the central hall on the first storey, looking out through the rotunda … in visual contact with the present. From the balcony, over the flight of stairs, those entering were offered a view that was not difficult to understand pragmatically: directly under Nefertiti in the central hall on the ground floor stood The Praying Boy, his arms raised up to Egypt.18
In the Neues Museum the bust is displayed in the north dome room, where it is approached through three Amarna rooms designed to set Nefertiti in her proper context. The bust sits on a black column protected by a glass case which allows visitors to inspect Nefertiti from all angles while, as the museum’s website tells us, allowing the queen herself to participate in the museum experience: ‘The gaze of the Sun Queen goes through the rooms of the New Museum right through to the south dome where it meets the statue of the sun-god Helios from Alexandria.’ The room is semi-dark, with lighting designed to emphasise the delicate modelling of the queen’s face. A bronze bust of James Simon, created by Tina Haim-Wentscher in 1931, is Nefertiti’s only neighbour.
We have already seen Little Warsaw’s attempt to place Nefertiti’s bust in a new, contemporary context, and the controversy that this provoked. In March 2005 the bust became the focus of the temporary exhibition Hieroglyphs Around Nefertiti, in the Kulturforum on Matthäikirchplatz. This exhibition, which aimed to trace the legibility of pictorial signs, placed Nefertiti alongside some of the more contemporary artworks in the Berlin collections, including works by Albrecht Dürer, Paul Klee and Max Ernst. Two years later, in 2007, the Italian ambassador curated an exhibition on the theme of Beauty, and chose to place a terracotta head belonging to the Ife culture beside the Nefertiti bust as a reminder of Egypt’s African nature. More recently, the entirely conventional exhibition In the Light of Amarna, a celebration of the centenary of the bust’s discovery, proved to be a huge popular success, attracting over 500,000 visitors to the Neues Museum.
In March 2016 came news of a daring art project: The Other Nefertiti. Using cameras strapped to their bodies and concealed by scarves, artists Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles had visited the Neues Museum and illicitly scanned the bust of Nefertiti. They revealed their project at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress, an annual conference organised by the Chaos Computer Club, and set up a website with a link to a torrent download, so that anyone with the right computer equipment might have instant, free access to the bust: ‘With the data leak as part of this counter narrative we want to activate the artefact, to inspire a critical re-assessment of today’s conditions and to overcome the colonial notion of possession in Germany.’19
The project was designed as a direct response to the Neues Museum’s refusal to make its own scans public while continuing to profit from the sale of replicas in the museum shop. The artists claimed to have used their data to create their own 3D printed polymer resin replica, which they were proposing to exhibit at the Something Else, Off Biennale Cairo initiative, before donating it to the American University in Cairo.
The free scan supplied by The Other Nefertiti provoked intense media coverage, and the artists earned praise for their attempts to ‘repatriate’ Nefertiti.20 It is impossible to know how many replicas were created from their data, but one is currently being displayed free of charge to the general public in the Hattiesburg Public Library, Mississippi. This replica was created by Mark Landis working in collaboration with the group known as Southern Artists, Forgers and Hackers.21 Taking over 150 hours to create on a 3D printer, the Landis Nefertiti was printed in three pieces at a 150-micron resolution out of a hybrid filament of wood particles and polylactic acid plastic. Each piece of the printed sculpture was then inspected, hand aligned and glued together. Once dry, the seams were filled in and the sculpture sanded to provide a smooth surface for painting. Landis then hand painted the bust to match photographs of the original. The Landis bust was not simply created as an easy means of obtaining a replica Nefertiti. Southern Artists, Forgers and Hackers were inspired by the Pirate Party’s platform of defending the free flow of ideas, knowledge and culture.22 They believe that 3D printing can be used to decentralise notable works of sculpture, with The Other Nefertiti project presenting a perfect opportunity for them to realise a reproduction. As ‘Michelle’, one of the artists, has commented: ‘the Nefertiti Bust is absolutely the most important object currently available to 3D print from an artistic perspective. It is also delightfully accessible and easy for anyone to print on a small scale.’23
Despite the undeniable fact that The Other Nefertiti made a 3D Nefertiti scan widely available to the general public, the project is unconvincing. Al-Badri and Nelles claim to have used a scanner of such low resolution and accuracy that it would quite simply have been incapable of creating a model as accurate as that subsequently supplied on their website. Cosmo Wenman, a specialist in digitally preserving and sharing scans of museum sculptures, has concluded that the scan they provide was actually obtained either by scanning a high-quality replica or, as seems more likely to him, by using an unpublished scan created for the Neues Museum by TrigonArt in 2008.24 Wenman’s deduction is supported by an interview given by Nelles, in which he explains that the artists themselves were only a part of the project. They were given the recording equipment by an unnamed partner, who subsequently ‘processed’ the data and produced the 3D model.25 The unknown partner has since vanished, leaving Al-Badri and Nelles to explain their impossible scans. In August 2016 Wenman sent a formal legal request to the Neues Museum requesting copies of their data from the 3D scan of the Nefertiti bust citing Berlin State and Federal German freedom of information laws. This request was turned down on the grounds of commercial sensitivity.