ART : Tomb With a View : A monument to an Egyptian queen comes to life in a stunning Getty Museum replica, itself a monument to conservatory craft

Ancient Egyptians didn’t simply bury their rulers. They sent them off to the underworld with everything a royal personage could desire for a luxurious afterlife.

Queen Nefertari, the favorite wife of Rameses II, was particularly well provided for. Laid to rest more than 3,200 years ago in what is probably the most beautifully painted New Kingdom tomb in Egypt, she was surrounded by a sumptuous array of food, clothing, jewelry, statuary, furnishings and ceremonial trappings. Most of these items disappeared in antiquity when the tomb was looted, and all that remains of the queen’s mummy are her knees. But the majesty of Nefertari’s reign has survived in richly colored paintings on walls of her tomb in the Valley of the Queens, across the Nile River from modern Luxor.

You can’t enter the actual tomb, at least not for a while. Nefertari’s resting place attracted hordes of visitors after it was discovered in 1904 by Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli, but the paintings deteriorated so rapidly that the site was closed in 1934. A six-year project undertaken by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Egyptian Antiquities Organization recently restored the paintings, but studies are under way to determine how much human traffic the ancient monument can endure without damage to the artwork.

Meanwhile, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu has built a full-scale photographic replica of the tomb’s most beautiful chamber. You can walk into the 10-by-17-foot replica, which is the centerpiece of “In the Tomb of Nefertari: Conservation of the Wall Paintings,” an exhibition opening Thursday and continuing to Feb. 21. A 1/20th-scale model of the entire tomb complex, a re-creation of a painted column from the tomb’s burial chamber and 42 works of Egyptian art associated with Nefertari or her tomb are also on view.

Entering an ancient tomb environment and coming face to face with near-life-size images of Egyptian gods and royalty is a unique experience for those who haven’t traveled to Egypt. The inaccessibility of Nefertari’s tomb for the past 58 years and the extraordinary quality of the wall paintings are likely to make the show irresistible to Egyptophiles.

But the exhibition is essentially about conservation, not art, says Getty antiquities curator Marion True, who organized the show. “We hope to heighten public awareness of the need for conservation, particularly for monuments in situ , which is more urgent that ever before,” she said.

“In the Tomb of Nefertari” offers an unusual glimpse into the activities of the Getty Conservation Institute, one of seven programs operated by the J. Paul Getty Trust.

“We think it is important to let the public know what the other programs of the trust are doing, not just for public relations but because what they are doing is very important,” said Deborah Gribbon, associate director of the museum. “It’s important for the public to understand that cultural monuments--although located in a specific country--belong to all of us. They are our cultural patrimony, and they are in need of preservation. The Getty Conservation Institute is addressing some of those needs.”

The problem in Nefertari’s tomb is its location in a limestone hill containing veins of sodium chloride. Over the years, rain infiltration and humidity brought by human visitors had caused the salt to crystallize, pushing plaster loose and causing paint to flake.

An international conservation team, headed by Paolo and Laura Mora of Italy, applied about 10,000 strips of mulberry-bark paper and cotton gauze to temporarily secure wayward fragments of paint. The conservators then removed salt crystals, reattached loose plaster and pigment with an acrylic resin emulsion and cleaned all the surfaces. Paint that had been added since the tomb’s discovery in 1904 was either removed or covered with mortar that matches other gaps in the painting.

True conceived of the exhibition in 1989 on a visit to the tomb with Luis Monreal, then director of the Getty Conservation Institute. The paintings were dotted with “bandages” during the period of emergency treatment. But the artwork was so captivating and the conservation project so intriguing that True thought the project would be of enormous public interest. As the exhibition evolved--along with a catalogue and a 10-minute introductory video--it required “a cast of thousands,” she said.

The star of the show is Nefertari herself, who died circa 1255 BC in her mid-40s. Although her husband ruled until he was over 90 and fathered more than 200 children by many other women, Nefertari was unusually powerful and privileged throughout her 20-year reign. Her name translates as either “The Most Beautiful” or “The Very Best.”

Little is known of Nefertari’s appearance, but she is depicted in the wall paintings as a lithe figure in a sheer white linen dress. The painted narrative that runs throughout the tomb depicts the queen’s afterlife journey, in accordance with Egyptian mythology about the death and resurrection of Osiris, god of fertility. As the story progresses, protective divinities and hieroglyphic texts from the Book of the Dead guarantee the queen’s safe passage through a perilous underworld. She offers appropriate sacrifices and partakes of ceremonies before being united with Osiris for eternity.

The paintings in Nefertari’s tomb represent an artistic high point of an extraordinary ancient culture. Getty press releases have described the artworks as being among the best surviving examples of New Kingdom period painting. Miguel Angel Corzo, director of the Getty Conservation Institute, goes a step further. “I believe they are the best,” he said. A combination of aesthetic quality, historical importance and fragile condition persuaded GCI to tackle the challenge of conserving the paintings, Corzo said. “We wouldn’t have undertaken a project to save the tomb simply because of its problems.”

The art-historical significance of the wall paintings is spelled out in Robert S. Bianchi’s essays in the exhibition catalogue. Egyptian painters rendered the illusion of human bodies emerging from beneath clothing at least 500 years before the ancient Greeks, Bianchi has written. The Nefertari wall paintings include the first images of human faces painted as three-dimensional volumes. The Nefertari tomb painters, or “servants in the place of truth,” exercised an unusual degree of freedom in their choice and mixing of colors, as well as in their technique of modeling volumes.

As museum visitors will see in the model of the tomb, Nefertari’s monument consists of half a dozen chambers and cubicles, with an interior stairway leading down to the burial room. Most of the rooms were originally covered with paintings, but the chamber reproduced in the replica was an obvious choice, Corzo said. Other rooms were too small, too large, too oddly configured or too extensively damaged. The replica and accompanying artworks are installed in a gallery that normally displays Roman portrait sculpture. A small theater for the introductory 10-minute video has been created in an adjacent room.

The video program, produced by the BBC, and nine illustrated text panels in the gallery condense an enormous amount of background information. The 42 artworks on view were selected to provide a context for the tomb and enhance understanding of Nefertari’s life, times and aesthetic milieu. All the objects in the exhibition were borrowed from other museums because the Getty does not collect Egyptian art.

“One of the most interesting objects is the bead net dress we borrowed from Boston, because it represents the archaizing tendency of the period,” True said, referring to a garment on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Composed of faience (earthenware) beads strung on cord, the dress is similar to those in the wall paintings, but it comes from the earlier, Old Kingdom period, reflecting fashion-conscious Egyptian women’s fondness for reviving historic styles. (The dress is so fragile that Getty conservators had to design a special vibration-free crate to transport it.)

Functional objects on view include a painted wood sarcophagus, lent by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, vessels for cosmetics and ointments, a board game and a painter’s palette. Among the artworks are several sculptures of Egyptian gods and royal personages. A granite statue of Nefertari, from the Harer Family Trust in San Bernardino, is thought be the only surviving image of the queen.

The replica of the tomb, installed in one end of the gallery, appears to be a rather simple construction of photographic panels. But it presented severe challenges to project photographer Guillermo Aldano and Olson Color Expansions, the Los Angeles laboratory that produced the panels by patching together images from transparencies, prints and slides.

The floor of the tomb is uneven, its corners aren’t square, walls aren’t smooth, and lighting is uneven--all of which made it difficult to produce a continuous, color-matched room of paintings, said Karen Manchester, associate antiquities curator. In addition, two paintings that face each other in the doorway didn’t allow the photographer sufficient distance to shoot them head on, she noted. The eight-foot-tall panels in the replica vary in width, so that seams are unobtrusive. The star-patterned ceiling is made of fireproof fabric printed by W. F. Johnson of Torrance.

“This isn’t Lascaux II,” True said, noting the limitations of photographic replicas when compared to the nearly exact duplication of prehistoric cave paintings in France. Photographic images in the Getty replica don’t indicate irregularities of the tomb’s surface or the depth of relief carving under painted images. But with those exceptions--and an increase in the doorway’s width for wheelchair access--the replica is surprisingly accurate.

As for conservation of the wall paintings, “everything you see is original,” True said of the replica. “The conservators seriously discussed the possibility of restoring the paintings, but they decided not to add any paint. What you see is ancient,” she said.

“The areas that suffered paint loss were covered with mud plaster specially prepared from local materials and textured in a fashion to be compatible with the tomb’s environment,” Corzo said. “We believe that the tomb’s architectural space, coupled with the quality and extent of the surviving wall paintings, is generous enough to allow for a mental reconstruction of an integral whole.”

Gaps in the chamber replicated at the Getty are surprisingly few, and the colors are astonishingly rich. “When you see how vibrant and fresh the paintings are, it’s hard to believe how old they are,” True said.

“In the Tomb of Nefertari” is the Getty’s first exhibition devoted to the conservation of a cultural monument. No sequel is currently in the works, but the museum plans to organize other shows on art conservation, said Gribbon, the associate director.

The show indicates another direction for the museum: borrowing artworks in areas that the museum does not collect.

“This is a way for us to expand the horizons of our collection. Our space has been very limited here, but when we move to Brentwood we will have a program of loan exhibitions,” Gribbon said, referring to the museum that will be a component of the Getty Center, now under construction.

The Nefertari show itself will probably have a lengthy afterlife, she said. The complete exhibition is scheduled to travel to only one other place, the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico, but the replica, video and illustrated text panels are portable elements that will lend themselves to educational programs.