Portrait versus Ideal Image

Ancient Egyptian art’s concern with individualized human representation has generated much
debate among Egyptologists about the very existence of portraiture in Pharaonic society. The issue
has often—if not always—been thought of in terms of opposition between portrait and ideal
image, being a major topic in the broader question of realism and formal relation to reality in
ancient Egyptian art. After a brief analysis of the problem from a theoretical point of view, the
article deals with the Egyptological reception of the subject and considers the concepts involved in
the notion of portrait within the context of ancient Egyptian thought. A few significant cases
selected from the corpus of royal statuary are then investigated in order to elucidate the motives and
modalities of the interaction between portrait and ideal image in ancient Egyptian individualized
representations.