More re Nebamun

It is only January, but I don't expect to see an exhibition in the next 12 months more moving than what is on view in the British Museum's new gallery of ancient Egyptian art. Beautifully designed, lit and labelled, it is devoted to one of the best-loved works of art in the BM – the wall paintings from the tomb-chapel of Nebamun, an obscure accountant attached to the Temple of Amun in Thebes (present-day Karnak) who died around 1350 BC.

Relatively little painting of any kind survives from the ancient world, so it is hard to overestimate the historical importance of these famous fragments showing scenes from the life of an ordinary man who lived for a flickering moment at the dawn of history.

But, equally, recent conservation confirms that these are works of art of the highest aesthetic quality. They were painted not by jobbing artisans but by true artists who made conscious aesthetic decisions, and were sometimes willing to break with the pictorial conventions of Egyptian art to achieve a surprising degree of naturalism.

One explanation for their appeal, I think, is that, unlike a lot of Egyptian art, they were intended to be seen by the living, not the dead. They come not from a sealed burial chamber (like the treasures of Tutankhamun) but from a chapel with an entrance at ground level which was accessible to the public.

In the early 19th century, Greek antiquities dealer Giovanni d'Athanasi hacked off chunks of the chapel wall depicting the most appealing scenes – feasting, hunting and naked girls. He sold them to the British consul-general, who then sold them on to the museum.

In the 1830s, the museum mounted the fragments in plaster of Paris. As the plaster dried, water evaporated through the painted surfaces, causing cracking. Later attempts to repair and protect the paintings led to further problems.

The main aim of the latest project was to stabilise the painted surfaces to preserve them for future generations, but it also offered a chance to analyse the artist's materials and techniques. "The analyses told us new things about the painter and his tools. But we also saw things no-one had noticed before, simply because we worked on the paintings for so long," says project leader Richard Parkinson.