Ceiling on the South Side of Nakht's Offering Chapel 1410 BC

Norman de Garis Davies made this watercolor of a ceiling on the south side of Nakht’s offering chapel. Davies was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to record tomb paintings in Egypt. He worked at a time when new archaeological discoveries had captured the public imagination, but before photography was widespread or color printing common. Museums depended on artists to document fragile sites, and the result was often an aestheticized version of the original. This vibrant rendering of geometric motifs is both a faithful record and an interpretation. We can view the original tomb through Davies’s institutional affiliation with the Met, and his visual language. The registers of zig-zags and diamonds might reference water, land, and the cosmos, but Davies’s rendering also brings to mind the aesthetics of Art Deco. The image embodies tensions between documentation and interpretation, ancient beliefs and modern aesthetics. We can unpack these issues by researching the history of Egyptology, museum collecting, and visual representation in the early 20th century.