Fragile, don’t touch

From Boston.com: Fragile, don’t touch
CAIRO - In a smoky office a short drive from the Pyramids of Giza, Mohamed Saleh, once the director of Cairo’s Egyptian Museum and now the man in charge of the collections for a planned $550 million Grand Egyptian Museum, is asked how much he knows about the bust of Prince Ankhhaf. The precious 4,500-year-old statue, 20 inches tall, left Egypt decades ago and is now on prominent display at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Saleh nods, smiles, and opens his laptop.

Just a few clicks, and the stoic ancient face pops onto his screen.

Four words are all Saleh needs.

“It is a dream,’’ he says.

The dream is the idea of the Ankhhaf bust returning from Boston, where it has rested since 1927. The Egyptian government is demanding the statue’s return, and the MFA has refused.

But this conflict - one of many the MFA has faced over works in its permanent collection - has been further complicated by the recent tumult in the Egyptian government. And while some claims for ownership of works can be made on legal grounds, this one treads on murkier terrain. The bust of Ankhhaf was given to the MFA by a previous Egyptian government, so the current government has no legal case. Any appeal must be made on moral grounds: that the piece is part of Egypt’s patrimony, and belongs at home.

For now, Saleh, a soft-spoken cultural leader respected by both Egyptian and American curators, remains hopeful. He pulls out a thick document that shows the planned interior of the new museum, which is meant to hold 10,000 objects, range over more than a million square feet, and attract 5 million visitors a year when it opens in 2013, less than two miles from the Giza pyramids.

He points to a prominent spot at the top of a walkway leading visitors through the entrance. This is where he is planning to place the bust of Ankhhaf, a royal architect who is believed to have overseen the building of the Sphinx and the second pyramid of Giza. A glass wall will allow the new museum to display the bust in the shadow of that very pyramid.

Exceptional among treasures
There are countless treasures from Egypt, but only one bust of Ankhhaf.

The work is special, a limestone statue covered by a thin layer of reddish plaster. Artistically, what’s notable about the piece is the realistic depiction of the subject, not typical for works of the period. Ankhhaf’s hair is receding. His eyelids droop. There are muscles visible around his mouth.

It is the “most convincing example of individualized portraiture in the Pyramid Age,’’ Dows Dunham, MFA curator of Egyptian art, wrote in 1943, noting that the subject had the largest tomb in the royal cemetery in Giza.

But the piece is also incredibly delicate, which is why the MFA refuses to loan it to anyone, never mind send it permanently back to Egypt.