Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1995 - 124

The

Mummy
A provocative

Faiyum

portraits

new
to

study
pharaonic

Medium
links

Roman-era
religious

beliefs

By Robert Steven Bianchi
since they were found
more than 100 years ago in
Ever the cemetery of El-Rubayat
in the Faiyum, a rich agricultural
region southwest of Cairo, so-called
Faiyum portraits have intrigued
Western art scholars. Considered
rare examples of Graeco-Roman
painting, possibly precursors of
Byzantine icons, they were not
linked in any meaningful sense to
the mummies from which they had
been unceremoniously
ripped in
anticipation of profitable sale to
collectors.
Scholars
European
regarded them as visual commemorations of the dead painted in a
classical idiom; no one entertained
the possibility that these life-like
portraits might somehow be indebted to the traditions of pharaonic Egypt. Now, in a refreshing
break with such traditional biases,
comes Lorelei H. Corcoran's Portrait
Mummiesfiom Roman Egypt (Chicago:
Oriental Insitute, 1995), a work that
will surely rock the hellenocentric
art world and set new standards for
the interpretation of these intriguing
images.
have been
Faiyum portraits
found attached to mummies at sites
from the Mediterranean to Upper
Egypt. They depict men, women,
and children who lived in Egypt
during the Roman. Imperial period,
from the first to the fourth century
A.D. That so few portraits have
been found in any one cemetery
suggests that those portrayed were
among the elite of their day. The
portraits were painted in either tempera or encaustic (hot wax in which
pigments have been suspended) on

November/December 1995

paper-thin wooden panels or linen
shrouds. One or two of them have
been found with frames, suggesting
that they may have been hung in
houses during the lifetime of the
subject. This is confirmed by the
fact that the tops were often cut
back before being attached to
mummy
bandages,
following,
apparently, the ancient Egyptian
tradition of providing mummies
with masks.
The paintings became popular in
Europe after their discovery in
1887. Theodor Graf, a Viennese
dealer who acquired most of those
found at El-Rubayat, toured Europe
and North America, selling many at
a handsome profit. Their immense
at the time may be
popularity
attributable to the contemporary
European predilection for miniature
portraits, particularly in Victorian
England. That even Egyptologist
Flinders Petrie, infamous for his
spartan character, was moved by
these paintings is evident from his
1913 publication, The Hawara Portfolio: Paintingsfrom the Roman Age, one
of the first archaeological "coffeetable" books. Many of the portraits
were published in color and at
postage-stamp size in this volume,
clearly reflecting their association
with Victorian miniature portraits.
From the beginning, Faiyum portraits were discussed, analyzed, and
dated as if they were independent
works of art. Divorced from the
mummies to which they had been
fastened, they were studied as
examples of Graeco-Roman painting, the only corpus of comparable
material being the wall paintings of

Pompeii and Herculaneum. Almost
every book and journal article published before 1985 treated them as
examples of Graeco-Roman painting that had nothing in common
with the art of ancient Egypt.
Scholars regarded the individuals
depicted as either Greek, descendants of those who had come to
Egypt with Alexander the Great or
were invited there by the Ptolemies,
or Hellenized Egyptians who appropriated a classical mode of representation.
The composition of many Faiyum paintings relies on the interplay of light and shadow across the
surface of the panel. White accents
painted on the pupils of the eyes
give them a sparkling, life-like
appearance. This technique anticipates similar highlights by Rembrandt and Hals of the European
Baroque some 1,500 years later.
Indeed, I believe that there may be
a good pharaonic antecedent for the
use of light and shadow on these
portraits. In my recent work on the
wall paintings of the Tomb of
Nofertari, wife of Rameses II, I discovered that ancient Egyptian
painters were interested in effects of
light and shadow at least 1,000
years before the earliest Faiyum
portrait. In some representations of
Nofertari craftsmen used different
gradations of the same hue two
different shades of a rosy pink, for
example to depict her face. The
result was a nascent chiaroscuro
that compares favorably with techniques used in the Faiyum portraits.
Although not all the links between
tomb and Faiyum portraits have

Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1995

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