Many new photographs were commissioned and some are shown since cleaning.ĭoxiadis’s text sets the people and the paintings in their social, artistic and geographical context, describing the techniques used and showing how the Fayum portraits relate to Byzantine icon painting, in a tradition that extends from ancient Greece to the Renaissance and on to the present day. Having selected the best and most interesting, she has grouped them according to the places where they were found. Illustrating almost 200 of the portraits, Euphrosyne Doxiadis’s book combines arresting beauty with up-to-date scholarship. Mummy portraitsor Fayum portraitsare paintings, often highly naturalistic and made on thin wood panels, that covered the faces of mummified bodies in Roman Egypt. Over 1000 have so far been discovered – men, women and children of all ages. In the Egyptian tradition, they embalmed the bodies of their dead but then placed a painted portrait over the mummy, preserving the memory of each individual to an uncanny degree. I hope they will write a future blog on MSI applied to mummy portrait research, as it is a fascinating and highly visual topic.įind out more about the inspirational work of our Scientific Research and Collection Care departments.Įxplore rooms 62 and 63 (The Roxie Walker Galleries), where these fascinating objects are on display.ĭiscover more about our research in this Getty Publications APPEAR Project publication.These remarkable paintings take their name from a district of Roman Egypt, whose people in the first three centuries ad included Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Syrians, Libyans, Nubians and Jews. Sets of multispectral images often act as 'maps' that highlight particular properties, allowing the mummy portraits to be viewed in a new way and to be compared with one another. Under different wavelengths of illumination MSI can be used to visualise the materials used in painting the portraits, including Egyptian blue, madder, organic binders and coatings. I would like to mention scientist Joanne Dyer and conservator Nicola Newman who have made an important contribution to mummy portrait research through the use of multispectral imaging (MSI) techniques. It is difficult to imagine how it could have been placed in cartonnage over a mummy.įramed portrait of a woman on fig wood panel, with cord for suspension. This one, however, may only have been for a wall display. Authors R Bianucci 1 2, F M Galassi 3, S T Donell 4, A G Nerlich 5 Affiliations 1 Dipartimento di Culture e Società, Università di. Her face is flawless: long and olive skinned, the nose long too, but neat and narrow, the brows crafted, the chin just firm enough to suggest a certain. The numbers refer to discussions in the text. Could these have been on domestic display first? There is a curious example in the British Museum – a small framed portrait made of local fig wood with attached fibre cords. Goitre in a Fayum mummy portrait from Roman Egypt (120-140 CE) J Endocrinol Invest. Some Fayum portraits, dating collectively to the period AD 70-250. Byzantine Icon Painting organised by the Vikelaia Municipal. Portrait paintings of the deceased, created on wooden panels or linen shrouds and placed in front of the face of mummified bodies, evolved from a 2,000-year-old Pharaonic funerary tradition, replacing the stylized three-dimensional mummy mask with a two-dimensional, personalized Greco-Roman portrait. Mummy portrait panels that were made using imported oak, fir and yew wood, as well as those using local Egyptian woods, are much thicker and flatter than those on lime wood. This note stems from a paper given in 1998 to the symposium From the Fayum Portraits to Early. If that is true, not all portraits needed to be on thin lime wood panels. It is possible that some portraits were intended to be displayed in houses before being used for burial. Was there a cost issue for this minority? Perhaps some people could not afford imported lime wood?Īctually it was probably something more complex. Only 20 percent of Roman period mummy portraits were made on native Egyptian woods. Cartwright.īefore the Roman period, cedar wood from Lebanon was imported into Egypt for high-status coffins, but in these earlier periods most coffins used local Egyptian woods such as fig (shown above), tamarisk, acacia and sidr (Christ's thorn). Image of a transverse thin section of fig wood, seen in transmitted light in the optical microscope.
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