Thursday, December 10, 2020

Tomb Portraits from Roman Egypt

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Young Woman
AD 190
tempera on wood
Bode Museum, Berlin

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Young Woman
AD 150
tempera on wood
Musée du Louvre

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Young Woman
AD 130-150
tempera on wood
Musée du Louvre

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Young Woman
AD 100-150
tempera on wood
Antikensammlung, Berlin

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Young Soldier
AD 130
tempera on wood
Antikensammlung, Berlin

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Young Soldier
AD 100-150
tempera on wood
Antikensammlung, Berlin

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Young Man
AD 125-150
tempera on wood
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Young Man
1st century AD
tempera on wood
Oriental Institute Museum
University of Chicago

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Woman
AD 130-160
tempera on wood
Detroit Institute of Arts

"Historically, the intense interest generated by mummy portraits has fueled centuries of collecting, underhanded dealing, and even formal excavations whose material consequences were not greatly distinguishable from all-out looting.  . . .  The loss of so much archaeological context in the excavations of the past – truly the great challenge, bugbear, frustration, and perverse fascination of studying the mummy portraits – has left many questions about them likely, perhaps even doomed, to remain open.  This has not, however, much dampened enthusiasm for the approximately one thousand portraits and fragments known to be extant and scattered throughout the museums of the world.  Indeed, the impassioned intricacies of the many scholarly debates surrounding them have, if anything, only intensified.  This enthusiasm typically features portraits being hailed as "naturalistic," which seems to be generally understood to convey that their execution of the human form largely calls upon Greco-Roman rather than pharaonic Egyptian models as well as to articulate the portrait's capacity to give the impression that one is in the presence of a carefully individualized personality.  The latter effect has culminated in some rather ecstatic, indeed almost mystical strands of criticism.  A characteristic example is given by Euphrosyne Doxiadis, who rhapsodizes, "they are not art, but truth."  . . .  That the mummy portraits are, in fact, the "only corpus of coloured representations of individuals to survive from classical antiquity" is also critical.  The mere fact that they are painted gives them a vibrant novelty so seductively different from, for example, the monochromatic marbles and bronzes of Greece and Rome.  Such sculptures, of course, looked quite different at the time of their creation.  Most would have been brightly painted and many would have had colored inlays; it is only the passage of time that has rendered them monochromatic.  . . .  One wishes that works on mummy portraits pitched to the general public – as many often are – might spare a contextualizing sentence or two to help rectify this skewed perception of ancient aesthetics.  One might also wish treatments of mummy portraits were a little more forthcoming about the extent to which, due to conservation and restoration efforts of the past, we experience the portraits through a materially altered lens.  These factors, perhaps as much as any, are to blame for the "not-art-but-truth" school of responses . . . "

– Alethea Roe, from Not Art but Truth: a Brief History of Mummy Portrait Reception, published in Discentes Journal (2016)

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Woman
AD 117-138
encaustic on wood
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Woman
AD 100
encaustic on wood
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Woman
AD 75-100
encaustic on wood
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Woman
AD 60
tempera on wood
Antikensammlung, Berlin

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Military Officer
AD 150
tempera on wood
Antikensammlung, Berlin

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Man
AD 100
encaustic on wood
Antikensammlung, Berlin