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1992-09-10
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CULTURE, Page 72THE TOMB OF QUEEN NEFERTARIMummy Dearest
Damaged by humidity and humanity, the wall paintings
memorializing the favorite wife of King Ramses II are gloriously
restored
By DEAN FISCHER/LUXOR
Of the several queens of the legendary Egyptian Pharaoh
Ramses II (1290-1223 B.C.), none outshone Nefertari. She was
Ramses' favorite wife, and by all accounts his loveliest. For
her death, Ramses commissioned a subterranean tomb in the Valley
of the Queens near Thebes, where she was portrayed in lustrous
wall paintings by the leading artists of the kingdom.
Nefertari's tomb, lost for three millenniums, was
discovered in 1904. Its treasures had been looted, probably in
antiquity, and its wall paintings had deteriorated. By 1940, in
fact, the decay had become so severe that Egyptian authorities
closed the tomb to the public. It seemed to have become yet
another endangered landmark of ancient Egyptian civilization.
But in 1986 the Egyptian Antiquities Organization and the Getty
Conservation Institute of Santa Monica, Calif., embarked on a
$4 million restoration project. The dramatic results were
unveiled last week. Although access to the tomb will be limited
for two years to scientists, scholars and visiting dignitaries
while the heat and humidity of the tomb are monitored, the joint
E.A.O.-Getty effort has retrieved a priceless cultural heritage
and, where the paintings are concerned, one of the finest
artistic achievements of the Pharaonic Age.
The work was carried out under the supervision of the
Getty's director, Miguel Angel Corzo, a Spaniard. When he began
six years ago, he faced a formidable task. Paint was flaking
and chunks of plaster were detached from the limestone walls.
Insects nested in corners. Egyptian officials had glued large
squares of cloth to the walls to prevent them from collapsing
and had suspended a net to catch portions of falling ceiling
plaster.
Corzo's scientific experts identified the two primary
causes of damage to the tomb: humidity and humanity. They
theorized that the deterioration before the tomb's discovery was
the result of a flood that occurred between 100 B.C. and A.D.
100. The scientists' studies also showed that the presence of
17 people inside the tomb for a mere half an hour could raise
the relative humidity from 30% to 50%, more than high enough to
allow bacteria to grow.
Corzo brought in a celebrated Italian husband-and-wife
team of art restorers, Paolo and Laura Mora, who led six
Italian and four Egyptian conservators in a year-long emergency
campaign. They applied 10,000 strips of Japanese mulberry-bark
paper to the walls and ceilings like Band-Aids, to keep plaster
from crumbling and paint from flaking. Then began the
painstaking work of restoration. The conservators swabbed every
square inch of the tomb with distilled water, gently removing
the accumulation of 3,000 years of dust and soot. In some areas,
they chiseled the layers of plaster and paint from the wall,
using the mulberry-bark strips as hinges, to clean the limestone
walls of the cave and repair salt fractures.
The conservation process took four years. No retouching of
the original paint was allowed; the purpose was to preserve
rather than enhance. Areas where paint and plaster had
disappeared were left bare. But many of the murals are
remarkably intact, the colors as rich and vivid as if they had
been applied yesterday.
Corzo notes that the artisans who labored in the tomb
three millenniums ago left unexpected evidence of their
fallibility. The rows of stars in the funerary ceiling were kept
straight by strings stretched from wall to wall. In the
sarcophagus chamber, conservators discovered a row of
fingerprints left along a string line by a careless craftsman.
In one corner, a contractor had scratched in hieroglyphics his
accounting of work completed. And on one pillar, Nefertari's
flesh-toned cheek is splotched with blue ceiling paint. Could
it be that she died before the tomb was completed and the
artisans in their haste failed to remove the blemish? Rather
than a distraction from Nefertari's beauty, the imperfection
serves as a bridge of human identification spanning the ages.