Another monumental piece of art has made its way to the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum: a colossal sphinx of Hatshepsut was installed this week to herald the exhibition "Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh," which opens on March 28 [2006].

The Met has occasionally used its Great Hall as more than a grand entrance. Thomas Struth video portraits played there three years ago during his retrospective, and a 10-foot-long stone chimera appeared in 2004 for "China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200-750 A.D." In April vases by the ceramicist Betty Woodman will be placed in the hall's neo-classical niches, as an introduction to an exhibition of her work.

The sphinx portrays Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt from 1479 to 1458 B.C., with the body of a lion and a human head. Carved from red granite with traces of blue and yellow paint, she wears a nemes (the familiar headdress of an Egyptian ruler) and a royal beard.

"It had been in our galleries, but because of the show, there was no space," said Dorothea Arnold, the Met's curator of Egyptian art...

A Colossus Is Camping in the Met's Great Hall, The New York Times, New York, USA, March 17, 2006.