Perfection

We wondered if seeing one statue was worth an entire afternoon at Venice. We had been standing in a line to the Uffizi gallery since 8 am and it was lunch time. If we joined the line outside the Accademia, we would have to let go of the one pm train and catch the four pm train from Florence to Venice. We decided to stay and I witnessed my greatest reaction to an inanimate creation.

It was nine years ago that I stepped into the Accademia and first saw the statue of David by Michelangelo. It was the first time I actually had a strong physical reaction to a work of art, something that I always thought was an exaggeration. I had read about the creation of David by Michelangelo in Irving Stone’s fictional biography of the artist when I was a teenager but nothing prepared me for the sheer magnitude of its genius. The statue rose in white alabaster marble, towering at a height of seventeen feet at a specially created place in the Accademia. Sunlight streamed onto the limbs of the young man who personified youth, virility, nobility and above all beautiful grace. The body showed strength, the stance had dignity while his eyes held pride and a warning to keep a distance. It appeared that the artist had captured everything perfect in a man in one piece of work.

Nine years later, this summer, I experienced another moment of complete enrapture when I reacted to the same way to the most unlikely partner to Michelangelo’s work. I was at the Neues museum at Berlin at my assigned time of half an hour past noon. We meandered through the labyrinth of rooms amazed at the vast collection when I suddenly stood in front of the bust of Nefertiti. I gasped at the beauty of the work and everything it represented. I wondered why I found it so captivating and majestic. Made in 1345 BC by the court sculptor Thutmose, the bust was of the Royal Queen Nefertiti of the Pharaoh Akhenaton. The queen was obviously in her late thirties or forties when she posed for the piece and her age had only lent a fragility and maturity to her beauty. Her head and chin were captured in an incline that indicated a fine balance between pride and humility for the queen was said to have been the daughter of a person in the Pharaoh’s army. Her chocolate brown skin, fabulous cheekbones, nose line , perfect ears, full lips , long neck and widely set almond eyes – one of which had been damaged irrevocably during excavation signified the ultimate beauty of womankind. The sculptors in ancient Egyptian times used to extend the head gear of female sculptures to give a certain symmetry to the head and extend the neck. The stance of the bust is not completely erect and flamboyant, but more feminine, almost coy. It is said that the queen ruled as Pharaoh after her husband’s death, for a short time, which seems believable by the elegance and quiet confidence the face exudes.

I was privileged to feel this way about two highly disparate objects of art which in my individual subjectivity signifies perfection in man and woman. You may however get Freudian and wonder why I found the perfect woman in a bust while ........