Tradition and Creativity. Toward a Study of Intericonicity in Ancient Egyptian Art

Although a key-concept in Art historical discourse and reasoning, creativity has almost always been avoided as an issue in the discussion of Ancient Egyptian Art, as if the notion was simply irrelevant in such a context. This surprising phenomenon has clearly deep roots in the history of the western vision of Ancient Egyptian Art (and civilization). Nonetheless, the investigation of some (actually quite rare) cases of true copies in Ancient Egyptian Art reveals that creativity operated within a process of reinterpretation of previous works and their tradition, a process that can be best described and analyzed, it seems, with the help of the conceptual frame of intericonicity (or interpictoriality). The paper also aims to defend the use of this notional tool in the analysis of Ancient Egyptian Art by attempting to define how creativity was conceived in Ancient Egyptian textual claims for innovation and originality