許多埃及雕像的鼻子都破壞了

許多埃及雕像的鼻子都破壞了

The most common question that curator Edward Bleiberg fields from visitors to the Brooklyn Museum's Egyptian art galleries is a straightforward but salient one: Why are the statues' noses broken?

布魯克林博物館埃及藝術畫廊的館長愛德華·布萊伯格·菲爾茲向參觀者提出的一個最常見的問題是:為什么雕像的鼻子被打斷了?

Bleiberg, who oversees the museum's extensive holdings of Egyptian, Classical and ancient Near Eastern art, was surprised the first few times he heard this question. He had taken for granted that the sculptures were damaged; his training in Egyptology encouraged visualizing how a statue would look if it were still intact.

布萊伯格負責管理博物館的大量藏品，包括埃及、古典和古代近東藝術品，他最初幾次聽到這個問題時感到很驚訝。他對雕塑已經(jīng)損壞這件事;他在埃及學的訓練鼓勵人們想象如果一尊雕像仍然完好無損的話會是什么樣子。

It might seem inevitable that after thousands of years, an ancient artifact would show wear and tear. But this simple observation led Bleiberg to uncover a widespread pattern of deliberate destruction, which pointed to a complex set of reasons why most works of Egyptian art came to be defaced in the first place.

幾千年后，一件古老的工藝品磨損似乎是不可避免的。但這一簡單的觀察讓布萊伯格發(fā)現(xiàn)了一種普遍的蓄意破壞的模式，他指出了一組復雜的原因，為什么大多數(shù)埃及藝術品一開始就遭到破壞。

A selection of objects from the Brooklyn Museum's collection will travel to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation later this month under the co-direction of the latter's associate curator, Stephanie Weissberg. Pairing damaged statues and reliefs dating from the 25th century BC to the 1st century AD with intact counterparts, the show testifies to ancient Egyptian artifacts' political and religious functions -- and the entrenched culture of iconoclasm that led to their mutilation.

本月晚些時候，在普利策藝術基金會副館長斯蒂芬妮·韋斯伯格(Stephanie Weissberg)的共同指導下，布魯克林博物館藏品的一部分將被送往普利策藝術基金會。此次展覽將公元前25世紀至公元1世紀的受損雕像和浮雕與完好無損的文物進行比對，證明了古埃及文物的政治和宗教功能，以及導致這些文物殘缺不全的根深蒂固的反偶像文化。

In our own era of reckoning with national monuments and other public displays of art, "Striking Power" adds a germane dimension to our understanding of one of the world's oldest and longest-lasting civilizations. This stylistic continuity reflects -- and directly contributed to -- the empire's long stretches of stability. But invasions by outside forces, power struggles between dynastic rulers and other periods of upheaval left their scars.

在我們這個對國家紀念碑和其他公共藝術展覽進行反思的時代，《驚人的力量》為我們對世界上最古老、最持久的文明之一的理解增加了一個密切相關的維度。這種連續(xù)性的風格反映了——也直接促成了——帝國的長期穩(wěn)定。但外部勢力的入侵、王朝統(tǒng)治者之間的權力斗爭和其他動蕩時期留下了他們的傷疤。

"The consistency of the patterns where damage is found in sculpture suggests that it's purposeful," Bleiberg said, citing myriad political, religious, personal and criminal motivations for acts of vandalism. Discerning the difference between accidental damage and deliberate vandalism came down to recognizing such patterns. A protruding nose on a three-dimensional statue is easily broken, he conceded, but the plot thickens when flat reliefs also sport smashed noses.

“在雕塑中發(fā)現(xiàn)的破壞模式的一致性表明，它是有目的的，”布萊伯格說，他列舉了破壞行為的無數(shù)政治、宗教、個人和犯罪動機。辨別意外傷害和故意破壞的區(qū)別歸結于識別這種模式。他承認，立體雕像上突出的鼻子很容易被打破，但當扁平浮雕上的鼻子也被砸碎時，情節(jié)就變得復雜起來。

The ancient Egyptians, it's important to note, ascribed important powers to images of the human form. They believed that the essence of a deity could inhabit an image of that deity, or part of that deceased human being's soul could inhabit a statue inscribed for that particular person.

值得注意的是，古埃及人把重要的權力賦予了人類形體的形象。他們相信，神的本質可以存在于那個神的形象中，或者，那個死去的人的靈魂的一部分可以存在于為那個特定的人雕刻的雕像中。