Egyptian artCeiling painting from the palace of Amenhotep III
ca. 1386–1347 BCE · New Kingdom · Dynasty 18
Ceiling painting from Amenhotep III’s palace at Malqata turns a roof into a flock of vultures and rosettes: an indoor sky for a living king.
Mercury 91 is not affiliated with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Images and object data shown here are public-domain Open Access (CC0) records from The Met collection. Citations are given so you can visit each work on the museum site.
Egyptian palaces are mostly gone. This fragment is a rare indoor heaven. Vultures of Nekhbet, protective wings, repeating flowers: a king could lie on his back and see a designed sky instead of bare mudbrick.
That is the closest object in this catalog to what a 3D universe is trying to do. Someone painted a roof so that looking up would not be empty. Mercury 91 builds a navigable night for a similar hunger, with different tools and no claim of temple authority.
Malqata was a festival palace in Thebes. The paintings are not funerary. They are for the living. That matters. Not every Egyptian sky is a coffin lid. Some are party roofs with theology still in the pattern.
This work is an inner-court highlight because it is the gallery’s thesis in pigment: the sky can be made. The Met holds the fragment. We hold a reading. The citation on the page keeps those jobs separate.
Citation
Ceiling painting from the palace of Amenhotep III. ca. 1386–1347 BCE. Dried Mud, mud plaster, paint, gesso. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 11.215.451. Rogers Fund, 1911
Public-domain Open Access (CC0) photograph. Dimensions: h. 140 cm (55 1/8 in); w. 140 cm (55 1/8 in)
