Walters Art Gallery: The Female Figure And Hippopotamus

2 Pages 487 Words

Walters Art Gallery: The Female Figure and Hippopotamus
By: Erin Bray

In the second or third millennium B.C. The Female Figure, a highly abstracted figure is the creation of a pre-Hellenic population of the Cycladic islands of the Aegean. Dubbed fertility goddesses, this female figure reclining with her arms crossed is typical of the sculpture of the Cyclades in the mid-2000s B.C. Characteristic features of this beauty include overall flatness, little bend in the knees, a deeply cut channel between the legs, and an almost complete dependence on incision to define body parts. The neck is unusually short, and the basic head shape irregular. Unfortunately its face is quite weathered, making the eyes and mouth less distinct than they once were#.

The beautiful little blue-hued Hippopotamus figurine in the Egyptian art wing really caught my eye. It’s vibrant agean blue color comes from the process in which it was produced. Faience is a glazed non-clay ceramic material or silica, composed of crushed quartz or sand, with small amounts of lime, and either natron or plant ash. The body is coated with a soda-lime-silica-glaze, most commonly a bright blue-green color due to its use of copper. When fired, the quartz body developed its typical blue-green glassy surface#. Under the glazes, the artist painted simple images of flowers and plant life, to give us the viewer an understanding of where the hippo lives and dwells. Its body it shaped in a feudalistic ideal manner causing it to be anatomically correct. No larger than four inches tall and seven inches wide, The hippopotamus though somewhat damaged, still has a magnificent presence; Maybe because its mystical associations with the god Seth, goddess Taueret and the monster Ammut. In art, Taueret appeared as a hippopotamus standing on her hind legs with pendant breasts, sometimes with the back of a crocodile and the feet of a lio...