Decontextualization in the 19th Century
Egyptian Landscape: Ruins by the Nile
Carl Werner (German, 1808-1894)
1870
Photomechanical Print
Gift of William Pomeroy Anderson, MSS 1979
Bryn Mawr College, 1986.8
European artists who traveled to Egypt often recreated romantic images of ancient and Late Antique monuments in their own work. This painting by Carl Werner shows deserted ruins alongside a traditional sailboat and a crocodile floating in the Nile. These sights were not uncommon in Egypt, but they nevertheless fulfilled Western viewers’ expectations for a seemingly timeless landscape. The foliage surrounding the ancient ruins shows how the Nile brings life, abundance, and fertility in a manner similar to Nilotic imagery on Byzantine textiles. This print demonstrates how associations of Nilotic abundance persisted from Antiquity to the present.
"L'Égypte Antique. Les Fouilles de M. Gayet à Antinoé,” published in Supplément illustré du Petit Journal
January 10, 1904
Paper with ink
Private Collection
This image of Gayet’s excavation at Antinoöpolis shows the racialized power dynamic in early twentieth-century archaeology. Here, Gayet is positioned as an intellectual overseer who stands above the Egyptian laborers. The visual rhetoric of the scene, particularly the figures’ clothing, stances, and actions, articulate the colonial nature of early excavations. The image idealizes the conditions of discovery for the mummy on the bottom left, which is draped in unstained and complete textiles. Gayet’s sensationalist approach to Byzantine Egyptian archaeology often decontextualized and misconstrued artifacts. However, the public interest it engendered had the benefit of supporting research on Byzantine Egyptian artifacts, including textiles.
