Art is in love with myth. Before written records, art seems to have illustrated myths whose details nobody knows: what stories were told in prehistoric times about the paintings in the Chauvet cave, or the stones of Avebury? Surely such narratives existed. Anyway as soon as writing does start to complement images, the deep impulse to give visual life to mythology can be deciphered.
The British Museum's Book of the Dead exhibition, which I reviewed yesterday, opens up a richer experience of Egyptian art by investigating the mythology of life after death that was so fundamental to this culture. But the relationship between art and myth is complex. It's one thing to look at the great Egyptian artefacts in the British Museum and see them as expressions of a body of mythology. But what happens when Egyptian art is translated from its original context? In the Vatican Museum you can visit the shrine to the Egyptian gods that the Roman emperor Hadrian created in his gardens at Tivoli in the second century AD. What did Osiris mean to Hadrian? He identified the god with his own lover, Antinous. Was this belief, or poetry?
Or, to take a more up-to-date example, the same question can be asked of all the souvenir Egyptian replicas visitors to the British Museum will buy. Is a shabti on your mantelpiece an expression of mythology, or memory, or nothing at all?
Although I did see a temple to Horus in someone's garden once, Egyptian myths are not our myths. Why does the art keep its power, for those of us who are not occultists? Perhaps the answer is that myth inspires art, but the art it inspires can outlive it. An image is not a text. If myth arouses enough passion and intelligence, it can bring truly great art into being. That art takes on a life of its own. We may not believe or even understand the stories ancient works of art or souvenir statuettes tell. But when we look at them we bask in the afterglow of the old stories.
