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Queen Nefertiti’s Eye and the Beauty of Incompleteness

2020; Wolters Kluwer; Volume: 8; Issue: 12 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1097/gox.0000000000003283

2169-7574

Kun Hwang,

Facial Nerve Paralysis Treatment and Research

When I stayed in Germany for a month, I visited the Neues Museum located in Berlin. There, I saw the bust of Queen Nefertiti (1370–1330 BC), the royal wife of the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep IV and the mother of the boy king Tutankhamun (Fig. 1). Since the profile of the bust appears on the title page of a scientific journal, and the technique of botulinum toxin injection is used to create an appearance similar to that of her elongated, thin neck, I enjoyed looking at it carefully.Fig. 1.: Bust of Queen Nefertiti (1370–1330 BC), Neues Museum, Berlin.The bust was life-sized (47 cm), and her face was almost intact and symmetrical. It was made from a limestone core and covered with painted stucco layers. She had a long neck, elegantly arched brows, and eyelids outlined in black. Her inner canthi descended abruptly and abutted the upper lid, forming epicanthal folds. She had high cheekbones, a slender nose, and an enigmatic smile around her red lips and slender neck. However, I could not see the pupil on her left eye, as the background of the eye socket was just unadorned limestone. This bust was found in 1912 at Amarna in the studio of the sculptor Tuthmosis, a royal artist who made statues or paintings of the king and of a few nobles. Her missing left eye has been an archaeological mystery, with no satisfactory consensus regarding possible explanations. An ophthalmologist speculated that she might have suffered from an ophthalmic infection, and a dermatologist suspected uveitis from Behçet disease.1 However, these theories were abandoned when new figures were found, showing the queen, some at an older age, with both eyes in perfectly good condition. Another opinion is that the artist’s work was interrupted and he left the studio, never to return.2 Yet another theory is that the bust was a model (modello) for official portraits and was used by the master sculptor for teaching his pupils how to carve the internal structure of the eye, and thus the left iris was not added.3 This mysterious eye reminded me a famous Chinese idiom: “Adding eyes to a painted dragon ().” The expression comes from a Chinese legend. According to the legend, a great painter named Zhang Sengyou (, 502–549) of the Southern and Northern Dynasties painted 4 dragons on the wall of a temple where he spent his leisure time. People were dumfounded when they saw that he had not painted the eyes, and asked him why (Fig. 2). He told them that if he had painted the eyes, the dragons would fly into the skies. People did not believe him and urged him to add the eyes. As soon as he painted the eyes of the 2 dragons, dark clouds covered the sky, followed by thunder and lightning. The dragons then freed themselves from the wall and flew to the sky.Fig. 2.: Adding eyes to a painted dragon (). Illustration was drawn by Hye Won Hu, MFA (1986–).I think Tuthmosis thoroughly understood “the beauty of incompleteness,” and therefore did not complete the “final touch.” As in the old legend of the Chinese painter, if the great sculptor had completed Nefertiti’s left eye, she might have blinked her eyes and animated all of her facial muscles, like Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Artists and plastic surgeons have the common trait of pursuing completeness, but never reaching it. Artists express their imagination by making sculptures or paintings. Plastic surgeons express their imagination on patients’ living bodies. In a cosmetic procedure, however, sometimes less is more. The idea of “less is more” in cosmetic procedures helps the new plastic surgeon and the general population. Despite a poem of Li Bai (): “In the morning, my hair was black like silk bundles. In the evening, it became white like snow,”4 our population refuses to get older, and continuously search for the youth fountain. In these days, many social media influence seeking of face or body perfection. Marketing of cosmetic plastic surgery has become extremely creative.5 A recent study reports that about half (48.5%) of Saudi Arabian women are influenced by social media to consider undergoing cosmetic procedures.6 Advertisements frequently use photographs suggesting that surgery provides an easy option to achieve an unrealistic outcome, pursuing completeness.7,8 Not infrequently, computer-generated images of perfection portraying ideal human beauty, bodies, or looks are used. This certainly is subject to question ethically based on unrealistic aesthetic considerations.9 Thereafter, in a cosmetic procedure, the incompleteness (realistic viewpoint) is beneficial to avoid complications especially in younger plastic surgeons. Both artists’ and plastic surgeons’ tasks are a difficult way to pursue completeness, and one must take a moment to stop just before reaching “completeness.” ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study was supported by a grant from National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020R1I1A2054761). The author thanks Hye Won Hu, MFA, for her illustrations.