![]() Stripped of their funereal context, moreover, they are naturalistic, indeed in important respects modernist in style, and this (as Christina Riggs astutely points out) helps them to appeal to today’s Western sensibilities. It is certainly true, as Cotter says, that they appear to capture personality as well as mere appearance. It is worth pausing here to consider in a little more detail exactly why the Fayum paintings have the effect on us they do. The Fayum oasis, showing the areas where the mummy portraits were found. By what? You should go over and talk to her, but she’s off in a world of her own.” ![]() “And there are strangers who aren’t really strangers. Didn’t you see that elderly gent in the subway and brush past that unisex youth in the street? And who is that woman across the room with the emerald necklace and stricken face? An Anne or an Alice, she looks overwhelmed. So is a distant, distant cousin, and a barely remembered college chum, and even an old flame you’d prefer to forget. “The prettiest girl from high school is here, and that smug 10-to-6’er she married. “The faces certainly seem familiar,” Cotter wrote. “They tempt us to imagine,” the archaeologist John Prag remarks, “that we can literally and figuratively come face to face with the past.” For John Berger, “the Fayum portraits touch us as if they had been painted last month.” And, reviewing an exhibition of portraits held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York at the turn of the century, Holland Cotter of the New York Times detected a whole gamut of human emotions in them – “despair, bafflement, anger” – and likened visiting the show to “attending a party among friends.” The portraits are, therefore, very nearly life-sized.įayum paintings have been celebrated for more than a century for the vividness and immediacy of the connection that they seem to establish between modern viewers and long-dead Egyptians. The vast majority come from two sites south of the oasis, er-Rubayat (the necropolis of ancient Philadelphia) and Hawara (associated in Roman times with Arsinoe) they combine the religious imagery of Rome and Egypt, and production of them seems to have ceased shortly before the final Christianisation of the Roman Empire. Each painting shows the head and shoulders of a man, woman or child and is painted on a sliver of wood measuring around 12 inches by 6. The paintings are the products of a multicultural society, one in which Romans mixed with native Egyptians and with Greeks descended from the Macedonian armies of Alexander the Great to create a polyglot community. They are the oldest painted portraits to have survived from anywhere in the world. Collectively, they are usually known as “Fayum paintings,” or sometimes “Fayum mummy portraits,” for most of them were recovered wrapped up in the burial linens of ancient mummies, placed in the spot where the face would once have been. It was dug up from a graveyard there more than a century ago, and is one of about a thousand such images, dating from around the time of Christ until 300 AD or later, that have survived long years underground and now lie scattered among the collections of the world’s great museums. The picture comes from the Fayum oasis, a wealthy district on the left bank of the Nile about 65 miles south of Cairo. Add to this the sheer directness of the painting (which is quite devoid of background, indeed absent anything that might compete for our attention with those compelling eyes), and the grip that the image has on us is easier to understand.Ī Fayum painting in situ, still resting on its original linen clad mummy. Old Masters may have captured character this well during the 1600s, but our portrait dates to Roman-era Egypt in around 190 AD, and is separated from modern schools of portraiture by well over a thousand year’s worth of stylised iconography and crude medieval sketches. The unease we feel is only magnified when the circumstances are unusual, as they are in the case of our elegant brunette, for we are simply not used to seeing such realistic portrayals of human faces from such a distant period. ![]() There is something profoundly disconcerting about gazing into the face of someone who lived so long ago, and have them look straight back at you – long and level, quizzical – in a way that simulates direct connection. Lacking realism: a stylised image of Christ and Mary from the Byzantine period. ![]()
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