ABSTRACT
I met Cyril Aldred for the very first time at the Brooklyn Museum during a session of one of Bernard V. Bothmer's graduate seminars which he was wont to conduct in the Wilbour Library there. The topic of discussion late that day revolved around an aesthetic assessment of the granite head of Osorkon IP from Tanis which is now in Philadelphia and its artistic antecedents. The dialogue between Messrs Aldred and Bothmer during that session was as electrifying as it was edifying because both of those gentlemen approached the topic as art historians, a discipline within the field of Egyptology with which both men are inextricably associated and to which they have both contributed so much. I am consequently very honoured indeed to have been invited to contribute to this volume dedicated to a scholar whose name has become synonymous with ancient Egyptian art history and aesthetics. As a consequence I have selected as my topic an inquiry into the meaning of putative portrait-like images in ancient Egyptian art, a choice motivated as much by the issues raised in that earlier seminar as by the fundamental changes occurring within the discipline of ancient Egyptian art history at present.
