The Fayum Portraits
Though Fayum Portraits were mentioned in a previous post, more attention is needed to be given on the subject.
Named for the Fayum Oasis where many excellent examples have been found, the soulful portraits attached to many Greco-Roman mummies hail from nearly all corners of Egypt. The first mummy portrait described was discovered by Pietro della Valle from Italy in 1615. The mummy portrait he described was found in Saqqara. It was not until the early nineteenth century that the portraits once again emerged from Saqqara and Thebes (wikipedia.org).
One Thoedor Graf was one of the first to describe the portraits. Little was known about the locational information of the portraits Graf was studying, but he ascribed the portraits to known Ptolemaic pharaohs, using as his basis coin portraits. Though the theory was not well argued by Graf, the study did garner Graf much attention, attention that was soon turned to the Fayum Portraits (wikipedia.org).
Beginning in 1887, the portraits were studied in a more methodical, scientific light by William Flinders Petrie. His first year of excavation in a Roman necropolis in Fayum provided Petrie with 81 portraits. The second year found Petrie competing with a German Egyptologist and an Egyptian art dealer. Despite this setback, Petrie found 70 more portraits. Petrie’s published works about the mummy portraits, though dated, remains one of the most important sources for the Fayum portraits (wikipedia.org).
The portraits were produced often on boards or wood panels. The paint is often of the encaustic style, pigment mixed with wax. These styles of portraits are often the best preserved. Another style is that of tempera, a watercolor used with a binding agent such as egg whites. The portraits would be set within the intricate wrappings of the mummy (Strudwyck, Helen; The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt; pg. 336).
It has long been speculated that the portraits were “Salon paintings,” produced sometime during the deceased’s lifetime and displayed in their home until their death. Recent studies, however, have found this to be far from actual fact. The likenesses between different individuals indicates these portraits were, at least in part, mass-produced with small variances to each face (wikipedia.org).
While not a source of physical representations of the deceased, the portraits do provide archaeologists with a unique look into the lives of the people they are meant to depict. Greco-Roman fashions are well portrayed within each painting. These provincial fashions, while not at odds with the fashions in the Roman court, were somewhat out-of-date with the popular Roman fashions (wikipedia.org).
By the middle to second half of the third century AD, the mummy portraits fell out of favor. There are many reasons why this shift occurred. In the third century AD, the Roman Empire underwent an economic crisis, limiting the amount of money people, especially the upper classes, could spend. While money was still spent on such things as sarcophagi, the majority of money was spent on the living, not on the deceased. Christianity was also becoming more popular and the need for preserving a person’s visage was no longer necessary for the afterlife. Furthermore, the Constitutio Antoniniana, the granting of citizenship to all free subjects of the Roman Empire, changed the social standings greatly, allowing for more of a distribution of wealth (wikipedia.org).
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