King Tut’s Wife
Good day, Henry here. King Tut’s body was finally revealed recently as archeologists carefully unveiled him, 85 years after Howard Carter first discovered his tomb with its fabulous riches.
Like almost everybody else, I have read various articles about Tut over the years which were all interesting but really had nothing to do with me. Then in a visit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York I came across an amber carving of the head of one of his wives. What struck me with considerable force was how beautiful she was, even with half her head gone. Modern women work endlessly to create, preserve or find this classic beauty in the mirror.
I guess what struck me was that such incredible beauty existed over 3000 years ago. Perhaps the beauty was not in the model but in the artists head and heart. Which ever way I think of it, classic beauty is clearly classic. It doesn’t come out of a bottle or a chemist’s lab.
I bought a poster of the image and have enjoyed it ever since. She seems to me to be the embodiment of classic beauty. She seems to me to be a rejection of the incredible huge fashion and beauty industries which have been largely created to feed on women’s insecurities.
It seems to me that there is a 3000 year old lesson here. When we really meet people, really get to know them, we discover that everyone is beautiful. We just have to learn to accept each other and most particularly ourselves despite our imagined or real flaws. Maybe this is the artist’s talent, finding the beauty inside.