Crazy for Egypt: Lecture and Exhibition

Two upcoming events, a lecture and a mini exhibition, will examine aspects of Egyptomania, providing insights into the fascination with ancient Egypt that has preoccupied world cultures since Roman times.

Brian Curran, assistant professor of art history at Pennsylvania State University, will deliver a lecture titled “The Sphinx in the Piazza: Egyptian Afterlives in Renaissance Italy,” Thursday, March 8, at 7 pm in Gamble Auditorium. Curran has written extensively on the topic of Egyptomania, including an essay in Italian Renaissance Cities: Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Crazy for Egypt, an exhibition of Egyptian and Egyptian-inspired objects from the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, the Skinner Museum in South Hadley, and a local private collection, will be on view from March 5 through May 27 in the “micro museum” in the courtyard of Williston Library. The show highlights the enduring Western fascination with ancient Egypt. The objects in the exhibition include an eighteenth-century Italian etching by Piranesi, a twentieth-century alabaster sphinx, a wood and ivory copy of a folding stool from the tomb of Tutankhamun, and a necklace assembled in the nineteenth-century using genuine scarabs. The exhibition, part of a series of micro exhibitions occurring during the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum renovation and expansion, is cocurated by Wendy Watson, MHC art museum curator, and Diana Wolfe Larkin, visiting assistant professor of art history. Larkin is currently teaching a seminar at MHC called Egyptian Art and its Revivals. In 1997, she worked with Watson to reinstall the College's collection of ancient Egyptian objects. As a research associate for the museum, Larkin is involved in an ongoing project to investigate the rest of MHC's Egyptian collection, which includes everything from relief sculpture to pottery to funerary figurines to small amulets.