Michelangelo of the Nile

I've always been fascinated by Egyptian art, and I've just heard that the British Museum's Nebamun Gallery is now open, displaying 11 wall-paintings from the tomb-chapel of a wealthy Egyptian accountant called Nebamun.

Dating from about 1350BC, the paintings are some of the most famous works of art from Ancient Egypt and, following a ten-year period of conservation and research by the BM, they're now on display together for the first time. Egyptologist Richard Parkinson has described the unknown artist as the 'Michelangelo of the Nile'.

The paintings were discovered by a Greek grave robber called Giovanni d'Athanasi, who dug them up in Luxor (there are marks on some of the fragments, where they were ripped off the walls - a reminder of how many of the museum's treasures were acquired) and then passed them onto the museum, via a collector in the 1820s. Giovanni d'Athanasi fell out with curators over his finder's fee and refused to tell them the exact position of the tomb, taking his secret to the grave.

Unlike a lot of Egyptian art, these beautiful scenes were intended to be seen by the living, not the dead, and they give the impression of the walls of colour that the visitors to the tomb-chapel would have seen.

The most celebrated of the scenes (seen above) shows Nebamun hunting in a marsh, surrounded by animals, fish, birds and insects. Simply stunning...