CAIRO — Art lovers and Egyptian history buffs interested in the country's monarchical period or social history are in for a treat at the Italianate Aisha Fahmy Palace, built in 1907 in Zamalek. The palace currently hosts the exhibition “Features of an Era,” which takes a look at the family that once ruled Egypt in displays of portraiture, sculpture and photography not viewed by the public since the 1952 Free Officers coup that toppled the monarchy. Some 150 objects and images from the time of Mohammed Ali to King Farouk document the aspirations and aesthetics of 150 years of monarchial rule and signal a shift in contemporary attitudes in republican Egypt toward it.

“Features of an Era,” which runs through March 27, unabashedly advances a view of khedival Cairo as a place where the country's rulers cultivated aesthetic values and promoted the Egyptian capital as a venue for and a patron of world-class artists. Verdi's Aida premiered down the street from the current exhibit, at Khedive Ismail’s Al-Gezira Palace, now the Cairo Marriott Hotel and Omar Khayyam Casino.

“I’m trying to show that in the past, Egypt was a destination for artists and intellectuals,” Ehab El-Lebban, the exhibition's curator, told Al-Monitor, pointing to a bust of Ismail, khedive and builder of the Suez Canal, by the Parisian sculptor Charles Cordier (1827-1905), who spent two years in Egypt on French government grants and commissions from Cairene nobility.

Cordier may have been one of the foremost French Orientalists, or more precisely “ethnographic” sculptors. His subjects ranged from Egypt’s royalty to Nubian peasants to Berber tribesmen. Cordier portrayed Africans in a human gaze, or in his words inspired by the "idea of the universality of beauty.”