An Art without Artist... Really?

Ancient Egyptian culture is well-known and recognized for its artistic productions, though Egyptological studies often tended to overlook – when they did not simply deny the existence of – the authors of these masterpieces as artists. In those recent years, however, a special focus has been placed on them, notably with researches aiming at tracking artists’ hands and practices through stylistic and technical analysis, replacing these essential actors of Pharaonic society in the forefront of Egyptological concerns. In this paper, I will analyse their social identity and status from an iconographic point of view, investigating their pictorial representations in ancient Egyptian art, i.e. by themselves. Those representations can be divided into two different corpora: on the one hand, workshop scenes in private tombs, where artists are portrayed as trades or social groups; and their own monuments, in which they appear as individuals, members of the elite (or a certain part of the elite). Just like textual autobiographies, those depictions were used as a tool to define one’s identity within the ideological framework of Egyptian society. The paper will analyse the social status of ancient Egyptian artists as it may be investigated from this iconographic vantage point.