2/18/2023 0 Comments Fayum mummy portraitsIt is estimated that as much as 30 percent of the population of Fayum was Greek during the Ptolemaic period, with the rest being native Egyptians. Native Egyptians also came to settle in Fayum from all over the country, notably the Nile Delta, Upper Egypt, Oxyrhynchus, and Memphis, to undertake the labor involved in the land reclamation process, as attested by personal names, local cults, and recovered papyri. Under Greco-Roman rule, Egypt hosted several Greek settlements, mostly concentrated in Alexandria, but also in a few other cities, where Greek settlers lived alongside some seven to ten million native Egyptians, or possibly a total of three to five million for all ethnicities, according to lower estimates.įayum’s earliest Greek inhabitants were soldier-veterans and cleruchs (elite military officials) who were settled by the Ptolemaic kings on reclaimed lands. Due to the hot dry Egyptian climate, the paintings are frequently very well preserved, often retaining their brilliant colors seemingly unfaded by time. The majority were found in the necropolis of Fayum. The former are usually of higher quality.ĭetail of a portrait within its mummy wrappings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, discovered by Flinders Petrie in 1911.Ībout 900 mummy portraits are known at present. Two groups of portraits can be distinguished by technique: one of encaustic (wax) paintings, the other in tempera. In terms of artistic tradition, the images clearly derive more from Greco-Roman artistic traditions than Egyptian ones. They usually depict a single person, showing the head, or head and upper chest, viewed frontally. Extant examples indicate that they were mounted into the bands of cloth that were used to wrap the bodies.Īlmost all have now been detached from the mummies. The portraits covered the faces of bodies that were mummified for burial. They are among the largest groups among the very few survivors of the panel painting tradition of the classical world, which continued into Byzantine, Eastern Mediterranean, and Western traditions in the post-classical world, including the local tradition of Coptic iconography in Egypt. It is not clear when their production ended, but recent research suggests the middle of the 3rd century. The portraits date to the Imperial Roman era, from the late 1st century BC or the early 1st century AD onwards. Due to the hot dry Egyptian climate, the paintings are frequently very well preserved, often retaining their brilliant colours seemingly unfaded by time.This heavily gilt portrait was found in winter 1905/06 by French Archaeologist Alfred Gayet and sold to the Egyptian Museum of Berlin in 1907. The majority were found in the necropolis of Faiyum. The former are usually of higher quality.Ībout 900 mummy portraits are known at present. The population of the Faiyum area was greatly enhanced by a wave of Greek immigrants during the Ptolemaic period, initially by veteran soldiers who settled in the area. In terms of artistic tradition, the images clearly derive more from Graeco-Roman traditions than Egyptian ones. The background is always monochrome, sometimes with decorative elements. The portraits were attached to burial mummies at the face, from which almost all have now been detached. They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift. Images of men and women making no appeal whatsoever, asking for nothing, yet declaring themselves, and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect. Imagine then what happens when somebody comes upon the silence of the Fayum faces and stops short. Why then do they strike us today as being so immediate? Why does their individuality feel like our own? Why is their look more contemporary than any look to be found in the rest of the two millennia of traditional European art which followed them? The Fayum portraits touch us as if they had been painted last month. They are the earliest painted portraits that have survived they were painted whilst the Gospels of the New Testament were being written. This is what John Berger has to say about the portraits: They were finely executed in a beeswax-based paint on wood or stuccoed linen. These astonishing portraits depict the inhabitants of Greco-Roman ancient Egypt in exacting detail. During the 1st to 3rd century AD in Egypt, painted panel portraits (more commonly referred to as Fayoum or Fayum portraits) were bandaged over the heads of mummies. In it there’s an essay on the Fayum portraits. I’ve been reading John Berger’s book, The Shape of a Pocket.
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