BEAUTY RETURNED

THE most quietly regal of all sculptured ladies reigned once again this week over West Berlin's Dahlem Museum. Nefertete ("The Beautiful One Has Come") is the museum's most popular treasure, along with Rembrandt s Man with a Golden Helmet, and she has been away a long time. Cached for safekeeping in a salt mine during World War II, she was found by U.S. troops and warehoused in Wiesbaden. Not until this summer was Nefertete wrapped in tissue paper, put in a nest of boxes filled with ground cork and gingerly brought back to her air-conditioned glass case m the museum.

Nefertete's flesh-and-blood prototype married one of the most interesting men in history--Egypt's Akhenaten. She was then only nine, so the story goes; at 13 she bore him their first daughter and at 20 their sixth. Akhenaten seems to have adored his lady, usually had himself pictured in her company He also insisted that her beauty and his homeliness both be represented candidly, almost naturalistically, thus smashing, for a moment, Egypt's formalistic art code.

All this was part of the Pharaoh's larger plan to destroy the nation's Pantheon of man-beast gods and substitute the world's first monotheistic faith: sun worship. A famed bas-relief shows Akhenaten, Nefertete and a daughter sacrificing to the sun god (see cut). Unfortunately, soon after Akhenaten's death around 1350 B.C., the priest-ridden, sybaritic Tutankhamen (the famed "King Tut" of the 1920s) rang down the curtain on his predecessor's splendid experiment.

Nefertete's bust, also a splendid experiment , found long and deep refuge in the Nile's mud and sand. It was brought to life at last by a German expedition of 1912. Amazingly well-preserved the bust lacks only bits from the ears, a royal viper from the crown and one rock-crystal eye.

The secret of its beauty lies in a perfect balancing and interpenetration of naturalism and formalism, serenity and tension. At first glance, Nefertete seems rigidly posed staring straight ahead, a symbol of dedicated otherworldliness. But a closer look shows her to be lively and natural in expression. Again, she seems at first to carry far too heavy a burden on her thin, soaring neck, but the strain induced by the weight of the crown is resolved in peace by the upward lift of the quiet mouth, wide eyes and winged brow.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.