Displaying the fragmented: damaged and mutilated ancient Egyptian figures from Sir Charles Nicholson's collection

In 1856–57, Charles Nicholson travelled throughout Egypt amassing a teaching collection for the newly established University of Sydney, founding the University’s Antiquities Museum. Among the coffins, ceramics, stelae, and mummified remains of animals and humans, are a series of fragmentary statues and figurines. Heads, torsos, and appendages, disassociated from their full forms, were shipped to Australia and placed onto, or even enshrined within, ‘permanent’ plinths ready for museum display. Some had their features restored while others were left in their damaged state, displayed with no attempt to represent completeness. This 19th-century museological practice transformed the fragmentary from seemingly incomplete parts into whole entities.
This paper provides an insight into the damaged and mutilated ancient Egyptian statues and figurines of Nicholson’s original donation to the University of Sydney and the interventions used for their original display. X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) was undertaken to understand the morphology and restoration or display interventions of selected artefacts. Additional compositional analyses were completed to understand the character of the 19th-century plinths. This paper presents the preliminary results of these analyses and concludes with a reflection on the changes in museum engagement with broken and damaged artefacts over time using the 160-year display history of Nicholson’s fragmentary Egyptian collection as a case study.