A quartzite fragment of a queen’s face, likely Amarna, is glamour under pressure: full lips and a cheek that outlived a demolished city.
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.
Amarna queens, especially Nefertiti in the popular imagination, taught the world a profile. This fragment is not a named certainty on the label, and this page will not invent a name The Met does not give. It is still a queenly face in the Amarna style: sensual, precise, broken.
Quartzite takes light like skin. That is why the shard feels alive. Destruction did the crop. We are looking through an accident that became a composition.
Akhenaten’s duck relief is theology. This fragment is the court’s beauty standard as rubble. Together they say the revolution had bodies, not only disks.
A fragment in a 3D temple should stay a fragment. We do not reconstruct a full bust in the hang. The missing edges are part of the object’s honesty.
Citation
Fragment of a Queen's Face. ca. 1386–1330 BCE. Yellow jasper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 26.7.1396. Purchase, Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1926
Public-domain Open Access (CC0) photograph. Dimensions: h. 13 cm (5 1/8 in.); w. 12.5 cm (4 15/16 in.); d. 12.5 cm (4 15/16 in.)
