Ancient Egyptian civilization bends the mind: more than 3,000 years of sophisticated, enduring culture with mountains of art and colossal architecture to show for it. The imprint of the latter — temples, pyramids, dizzyingly huge monuments, some opened to public view for the first time in decades just this year — remains astonishing enough to lend credence to notions of alien technologies come to earth. (It’s not: It was done, excruciatingly, by many hands, typically enslaved, over generations.)
But even in so broad a span of time, there were formative phases when standards were set, influences exerted, rules made that endured. That’s the precept of “Maverick Kings: Three Visionary Pharaohs of Egypt’s Golden Age,” the Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s captivating take on ancient Egyptian aesthetics, established and refined during a crucial century-plus period.
The exhibition is a revelation, zooming in on a foundational slice of Egyptian creative life between 1479 and 1336 BCE and the three rulers that made it possible. It’s also a novel and inventive deployment of a cornerstone collection of the MFA, among the best outside of Egypt.
The MFA has been showing off the many wonders of its Pyramid-age collection since its new galleries opened in 2021. The pyramid era sits at the top of the marquee for obvious reasons; size, for one thing, matters. But “Maverick Kings,” the brainchild of the museum’s longtime Egyptian curator, Lawrence Berman, looks past the obvious, going deeper to explore a precise, culturally rich moment that came some thousand years later, when art in the Egyptian Kingdom, fertile with relative peace, truly thrived.
Its root is not with a king at all, but a queen: Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt from 1473 to 1458 BCE. “King” in this case is semantic; Berman points out in an essay in the MFA’s recent book “Faces of Ancient Egypt” that there was no word in Ancient Egyptian for “queen.” But rule she did, and with a priority on provocative and innovative styles that are now emblems of ancient Egyptian art more broadly.
The exhibition splits floorspace among its three regents in chronological order: Queen Hatshepsut; King Amenhotep III, and King Akhenaten. The galleries that house Hatshepsut’s rule are somber and moody, low-lit, with earthy, ochre walls. They forge an immediate connection between her ancient world and the museum itself: One of the very first Egyptian objects to arrive in North America — in 1835! — was a fragment from one of her fallen granite obelisks at Karnak, recovered by the Bostonian John Lowell Jr. on a trip up the Nile that year.
Hatshepsut, carved into it — her face in profile, almond eyes, shoulders squared, Pharaonic headdress with rearing cobra — is now basically a pop-cultural meme, a catch-all icon. It started somewhere, and this is when.
Why? Well, the show elaborates that Hatshepsut’s rule was marked by a keen interest in artistic and cultural innovation. She was a builder, the first great one of her time. The vast temple at Karnak — Egypt’s grandest and most expansive — grew massively during her reign, to the scale it’s now known for; Medinet Habu, built later by Ramses III, was initiated by her. The great complexes of Luxor were begun by her too, starting the transformation of Thebes, the capital, into a ritual landscape for centuries to come.
A captivating limestone sculpture of the queen perches at the center of the space — regal, noble, refined, her serene features captured mesmerizingly in the pale stone. It’s one of those objects that stops you flat: nearly 3,500 years old, so accomplished and refined that it feels impossible.
Also notable is the damage inflicted upon it, much of it deliberate: After her death in 1458 BCE, her stepson, Thutmose III, waged an assault on her memory and accomplishments, villainizing her as a usurper. (It’s complicated, in a “House of the Dragon” way; her husband and half-brother, Thutmose II, was passed over by their father, Thutmose I, when he declared Hatshepsut his heir.) Various effigies suffered similar desecrations, but some things aren’t so easily erased; a towering video of her massive memorial temple at Deir el-Bahri unspooling behind the sculpture here is easy testament to that.
What Hatshepsut started, King Amenhotep III brought to mass-scale fruition starting in 1390 BCE. Berman uses video in ways that elaborate rather than impose, despite their grand scale. In the galleries dedicated to Amenhotep’s rule, a smiling portrait of the king in quartzite, his long oblong headdress arching up from his forehead, reflects the bright daylight view of a fly-through of his mortuary temple across the Nile from Luxor. It’s marked by an array of 70-foot tall seated collossi in the bright, blazing Egyptian sun. The site only recently opened to the public, the latest in Egypt’s ancient world tourism bonanza.
It offers context for the objects found here, and for the extent of Amenhotep’s wealth and influence. He ruled in peacetime, when the kingdom was so awash in riches that “gold in your country is dirt,” the king of Assyria wrote to him once. “One simply gathers it up.”
Amenhotep used his idle time and vast wealth to invest in cultural advancement. (He took up the name “menuwy,” or “the monument man.”) He took aesthetic cues from Hatshepsut’s reign, and cemented them as iconic. More artists had time and resources, and aesthetic culture flourished, however much it was bent to the glorification and whim of the king. (To appease the ever-flinty Sekhmet, the lioness goddess of war and healing, he had 1,000 stone sculptures of her made and placed throughout his mortuary temple; one of them, in smoothly polished gray-black granodiorite, looms here, nearly 6 feet tall.)
But Amenhotep really was a patron of the arts in a way others hadn’t been. Innovation in his reign abounded, and some of the objects marshaled from the MFA collection truly astonish. Some were on display before, in dusky cramped galleries, now closed. Here, well-lit and with room to breathe, they shine. Big objects are rightfully attention-getters: A polished-smooth falcon in granodiorite, perched on a boxy plinth, wears a towering headdress; the broken coils of a cobra, sleek and sinuous, sit nearby.
But don’t look past the little things: A case of small portrait busts glows in the darkened space, captivating and gorgeous. All show a supreme mastery of hand, but linger on the small “head of a man” masterfully carved in deep crimson quartzite. With its intricacy of hand and matte, earthy tone, its as accomplished and magnetic an object as you’ll find here.
Last in line here is Akhenaten, who ruled after Amenhotep’s death in 1352 BCE, and who seemed to see his predecessor’s rule as too much of a good thing. A religious and aesthetic conservative, he commanded a complete shift: one god, the sun, a break from the polytheism of centuries; and a looser, more realistic representational style.
He had radical ideas that were at odds with tradition: He had himself, his queen, Nefertiti, and his two daughters depicted in casual daily activity, not in stilted, formal poses; some temple fragments on view here capture his young daughters at play.
Others show a loose, informal, almost cartoonish style of representation, a departure from the rigid mannerism of years past. He was surely an iconoclast, fascinating and steadfast in his belief, though it didn’t go over well. After he died, his capital city was abandoned and most of his symbols were destroyed, which is why pieces from his reign here are notably few and non-monumental.
At least one gives pause: The delightfully weird “Naos of chief sculptor Bak and his wife, Taheri,” made during Akhenaten’s reign. Carved from unpolished purplish quartzite, the figures of Bak, the king’s aesthetic zealot, and his wife, are coldly naturalistic and unaggrandizingly frank. It’s one of the oddest objects of the ancient world, and surely one made at behest of a king.
Akhenaten, it seems, was like that. From the ruins of his reign, Tutanakhamen, the boy king — his son — picked up and moved on starting in 1336 BCE. He’d learned a thing or two from his father’s failed rule: He restored the old gods, and a classic aesthetic crept back to prominence. A small bust of him displays those sharply carved almond eyes of Amenhotep’s rule.
It all makes a fair case, I think, for a long-held hope among Egyptophiles at the MFA, only now coalescing into a possibility. “Maverick Kings” is compelling, but temporary, its many wonders currently with no fixed address — or permanent home — within the museum’s walls. That seems wrong. On display here is a deeper understanding of foundational civilization; what was old, or ancient, feels new again. Is there better use for a collection than that?
MAVERICK KINGS: THREE VISIONARY PHARAOHS OF EGYPT’S GOLDEN AGE
At Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 465 Huntington Ave. Through Dec. 6. 617-267-9300, mfa.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com.