BERLIN, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- The painted limestone bust of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti will be moved to a new permanent home in Berlin's Old National Gallery, it was announced Friday.
The new site is on the city's Museum Island in the Spree River. The bust had been on display at Berlin's Egyptian Museum for nearly a century.
The move of the bust of the wife of the heretic pharaoh, Akhenaten, is part of the restoration project involving the island's five museums, which were badly damaged during World War II. Before moving, Nefertiti will be part of a special exhibition about hieroglyphics and symbolism in the arts at the Kulturforum in Berlin, March 2-Aug. 2.
The bust is believed to be a workshop likeness of the queen that was used as a model for other portrait busts and has one eye left unpainted. It was discovered by German archaeologists in 1912 and has been one of Berlin's most popular art attractions ever since. It dates from the Amarna period of Egyptian art (about 1340 B.C.).
The bust is being moved because the Egyptian Museum is being closed as a result of the reopening of the Old National Gallery's antiquities collections.
