Ancient

Ancient is an art period of the -3500–500 period. The gallery holds 22 works in this period, including works by Nina M. Davies, Norman de Garis Davies and Danuta Małachowska.

The art-historical "Ancient" period spans human creativity from the earliest written records to the close of the classical world—roughly the fourth millennium BCE through the fall of Rome. It begins with the first urban civilizations of the Nile and of Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates, where art arose not as decoration but as an instrument of religion, kingship, and the afterlife. In Egypt, painting and relief flourished above all in the service of the dead: officials of the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BCE) commissioned vivid scenes for their rock-cut chapels in the Theban Necropolis on the west bank of the Nile, opposite modern Luxor.

Ancient art is defined less by individual expression than by enduring conventions. Egyptian painters used the "composite" view—head, legs, and feet in profile, but eye and shoulders frontal—so that each part of the body and each object appeared from its most recognizable angle. Scenes were ordered into horizontal registers whose lower borders served as ground lines, and depth was suggested by overlapping or stacking figures. Unlike royal tombs, the tombs of the nobles dwell on earthly life: ploughing, food preparation, craftsmen, banquets, and tribute-bearing foreigners. Many such scenes survive to us through the meticulous facsimiles in this collection by Nina M. Davies (1881–1965) and Norman de Garis Davies (1865–1941), including *Syrians Bringing Vessels and Weapons* from the Tomb of Rekhmire (TT100, Dynasty 18, c. 1504–1425 BCE) and *Foreigners* from the Tomb of Menkheperraseneb.

Most ancient makers are anonymous, but classical Greece gives us the first named masters. Phidias oversaw the sculptural program of the Parthenon, while Polykleitos codified ideal male proportion in his *Canon*, embodied in the *Doryphoros* (Spear-Bearer), whose lost bronze original dates to about 440 BCE. The Classical period (c. 480–323 BCE) balanced idealized beauty with naturalism; the ensuing Hellenistic age (323–31 BCE) pursued movement and emotion.

The legacy of ancient art is foundational. The Greek canon of proportion and naturalism shaped Roman art and, through the Renaissance, the entire Western tradition. The Davies facsimiles carry a second legacy: made before color photography, with the same hues and brush orientation as the originals, they preserve the condition of fragile Theban tombs as they stood a century ago.