Павлов, В. В. Скульптурный портрет в древнем Египте. Первое издание. Обложка, титул и инициалы Н. Астафьевой. Серия: Портрет в мировом искусстве.
Москва ; Ленинград : Государственное издательство «Искусство», 1937. 52 с., 50 илл.; 26х17 см.
Твердый издательский переплет. Тираж 3 000 экз. Фототипии на вклейках.
Переплет - хорошее: пятна на передней крышке, потертые и надорванные концы корешка. Блок - хорошее: полный.
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Pavlov, V. V. Sculptural Portrait in Ancient Egypt. First edition. Cover, title page and initials by N. Astafieva. Series: Portrait in World Art.
Moscow ; Leningrad : Iskusstvo State Publishing House, 1937. 52 pp., 50 illustrations ; 26 x 17 cm.
Publisher's hardcover. Print run of 3,000 copies. Phototype plates on tipped-in leaves.
Binding good: staining to the front board, worn and split spine ends. Text block good: complete and clean.
The first Russian-language monograph on the sculptural portrait of ancient Egypt, written by Vsevolod Vladimirovich Pavlov (1898-1972), the leading Soviet Egyptologist and art historian, long associated with the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and Moscow University. Issued in Iskusstvo's series "Portrait in World Art", the book is a short, argued study of the problem Pavlov defines in his introduction: what is specific about Egyptian realism in portraiture, a question Egyptologists since Mariette had noted without solving. He follows the stylistic lines of Egyptian portrait sculpture from the Old Kingdom, with the head of a scribe now in the Louvre, through the dramatised royal faces of Senusret III in the Middle Kingdom, to the Amarna portraits of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and engages Soviet and foreign scholarship from Turaev to Waldhauer. The illustrations, reproduced as phototype plates printed at the IZOGIZ phototype workshop, were an important selling point in an era when museum photographs were hard to obtain. It was set in August 1937 and signed to the press in January 1938, a date that places it among the last art-historical books produced in the old Moscow-Leningrad Iskusstvo format. Pavlov later returned to the subject in two further books, in 1957 and 1967, but the 1937 volume is the original and the one that opened the field in Russian. It will appeal to collectors of Egyptology and the history of Soviet art scholarship.