Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt

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Portrait of a boy, ca A.D. 150–200. Encaustic on wood. The Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. More about This Exhibition During the first through the third century A.D., a unique art form—the mummy portrait—flourished in Roman Egypt. Stylistically related to the tradition of Greco-Roman painting, but created for a typically Egyptian purpose—inclusion in the funerary trappings of mummies—these are startlingly realistic portraits of men and women of all ages. More than seventy of the finest mummy portraits from European and North American collections were on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from February 15 through May 7, 2000 in "Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt." Also on view were a range of objects—including jewelry, papyri, sculpture, and wrapped mummies—illustrating the culture and funerary customs of the time. These rare and fragile works, including the Metropolitan's entire collection of mummy portraits, did not travel as a group to any other venue. Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum, commented: "Created nearly 2,000 years ago and, until recently, all but overlooked by scholars and the public alike, these ancient faces still engage the modern viewer by the directness of their gaze and their evocation of a long-gone society. The athletes, learned men and women, soldiers, and priests, children, adolescents, and old people are rendered in rich colors with the freshness of yesterday." The exhibition was made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Metropolitan's presentation of "Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt," was the result of a collaboration with the British Museum, which organized a similar exhibition in 1977. With that groundwork, a new selection of objects was chosen for the New York presentation. The full range of mummy portrait techniques—encaustic and tempera on wood panels, tempera paintings on linen, and painted masks and coffins of plaster and cartonnage—was represented in the exhibition, which was organized thematically and chronologically. The exhibition began with an introduction to Roman Egypt, from everyday life to religious beliefs and funerary customs. The exhibition was the third in a series of four offered at the Metropolitan in 1999–2000 focusing on the art of Egypt. Roman Egypt More about Mummy Portraits More about the Objects on View Early European Interest in Mummy Portraits Educational Programs Exhibition Publications

Roman Egypt
After the battle of Actium and the death of Cleopatra VII (30 B.C.), Egypt became part of the Roman Empire. The importance of the new province was expressed by its special status as the personal estate of the emperor, ruled by a prefect. Rome's interest in Egypt was, to a large degree, economic: the fertile lands along the Nile were capable of producing a rich surplus of foodstuffs, especially grain, that became essential in feeding the populace of the city of Rome. Moreover, the port of Alexandria exported Egypt's manifold manufactured goods, such as papyrus, glass, and other luxury articles, while the Nile and the desert routes linking it with the Red Sea provided trade connections with inner Africa, the Arabian peninsula, and India. Egypt's deserts also furnished a great variety of minerals, ores, and hard stones. The beneficiaries of such advantageous economic conditions were—for a while, at least—not only the Roman rulers but also a rich upper class of landowners and merchants in Egypt itself, consisting of a complex mixture of indigenous Egyptians and descendents of people from countries all around the eastern Mediterranean who had settled in the Nile Valley and oases (such as the Fayum) during the rule of the Ptolemies (332–30 B.C.).

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More about Mummy Portraits
The truly multicultural population in the cities of Roman Egypt, provided a fertile ground for phenomena such as the painted panel portraits on mummies. In their artistic style and technique, the portraits on wood panels followed the Greek painting tradition of depicting the subject in three-quarter view, with a single light source casting realistic shadows and highlights on the face. Indeed, since practically no panel paintings from the Greek world have been preserved, the mummy portraits—conserved by Egypt's arid climate—are the only examples of an art form that ancient literary sources place among the highest achievements of Greek culture. Besides style and technique, the clothing, hairstyles, and jewelry worn by the individuals represented in the panel portraits display fashions that were prevalent in the whole Roman Empire—most likely under strong influences from the imperial court at Rome—but also incorporating special eastern Mediterranean idiosyncrasies, such as a profusion of curls in some of the female hairdos. None of these styles and fashions had any connection with traditional Egyptian customs. In short, taken by themselves, the encaustic panel portraits appear to have no links with Pharaonic Egypt.

Seen in their original context, however, the character of the painted portraits changes. Placed over the faces and fastened into the linen wrappings of Egyptian mummies, the portraits demonstrate clearly that the seemingly Greco-Roman individuals represented in the paintings adhered to traditional Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife. Strong ties to the traditional Pharaonic religion can also be deduced from the popularity of Hawara as a burial place for panel portrait mummies. This site, at the entrance to the Fayum oasis, was the place of the pyramid and mortuary temple of the Middle Kingdom Pharaoh Amenemhat III (ca. 1844–1797 B.C.). Greek authors called the temple the "labyrinth," describing statues of "monsters"—that is, crocodile and other animal-headed deities—still standing in their chapels in the first century A.D. The wish to be buried in such a place signals not only veneration of Egyptian deities, but a deep-seated need for a connection to the traditional religion and culture.

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More about the Objects on View
In "Ancient Faces," the encaustic panel paintings are presented in chronological groups, separating the colorful, very painterly Julio-Claudian panels (35–69 A.D.), which seem to capture a fleeting moment, from the full-blooded Flavian (69–96 A.D.), and the sculptural Trajanic (96–117 A.D.) paintings. A number of very striking images from the period of Emperor Hadrian (117–138 A.D.) show interesting differences between the works from the Fayum and those from Antinoopolis, a city founded by Hadrian in 130 A.D. The following Antonine period (138–192 A.D.) was a peak in the painting of mummy portraits, with many unforgettable images, such as the priest of Serapis (cat. 21), the young man from the Munich Antikensammlung (cat. 19), the young man from Berlin (cat. 39), and a number of the Museum's own portraits (cat. 69–71), all masterpieces of characterization through paint. Some late Antonine to early Severan pieces from the turn of the second to the third century include a boy's portrait from the Getty Museum (cat. 61) and a bearded man from the Louvre (cat. 54), the latter again from Antinoopolis. Since the later first century, but especially during the Antonine period, tempera paintings appear parallel to those in encaustic. These take an important place also during the last period of mummy portrait painting, the first half of the third century with highlights such as two panels with young boys' images from the Brooklyn Museum of Art (cat. 44–45) and a man with a short beard from the Getty Museum (cat. 47).

Linen shrouds wrapped around mummies were painted with representations of full-length figures, usually in tempera, or in a mixture of tempera and encaustic. Some shrouds were shown in the exhibition side-by-side with the contemporary panels. One especially beautiful shroud and a fragment of another, both from the Louvre, were among the latest objects in the exhibition. On the more complete shroud (cat. 99), which is from Antinoopolis, a woman is pictured wearing a purple dalmatic (a wide-sleeved garment) and holding in her left hand an Egyptian ankh (life) symbol; she lifts her right hand, palm open, in a gesture of protection and veneration known from images of Isis. The catalogue entry describes this image aptly as a perfect illustration "that the fourth century was a... period of transition between paganism and Christianity."

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Early European Interest in Mummy Portraits
News of the existence of mummy portraits reached Europe in the mid-17th century, when Pietro della Valle (1586–1652) published an account of his travels to Persia and India by way of Egypt. Although the two mummy portraits he acquired in Saqqara (outside Cairo) were described and depicted in the book, they were perceived as curiosities rather than works of art. Another two centuries would elapse before mummy portraits would attract a sustained level of attention in Europe.

Archaeological excavations by the British and the French early in the 19th century yielded additional portraits, but it took several extensive finds late in the century to pique the interest of scholars and connoisseurs.

In 1887, inhabitants of the area near el-Rubayat (in the Fayum) discovered and excavated numerous mummies with portraits. Purchased immediately by Theodor Graf (1840–1903), an Austrian businessman, these works were exhibited in various European cities and in New York before being sold to buyers worldwide.

In 1888–89, the noted English archaeologist W. M. Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) discovered a major Roman-period cemetery at Hawara (also in the Fayum), the burial site of many mummies with finely rendered, mainly encaustic portraits. The importance of the Hawara find cannot be overstated, as most of the mummy portraits now in the United Kingdom were discovered there by Petrie. In the 1890s, a German expedition to Hawara was mounted, and Petrie himself returned in 1911.

In the decades that followed, however, public as well as scholarly interest in mummy portraits waned. Egyptologists devoted their investigations to the art of the pharaohs, while scholars of Greek and Roman art considered the mummy portraits an expression of Egyptian art, and therefore outside their purview. With the rise of interdisciplinary studies came renewed interest in Roman Egypt, and mummy portraits have once again attracted general interest and attention. Subsequent excavations at sites such as Fag el-Gamus, el-Hibeh, Antinoopolis, Akhmim, and Marina el-Alamein suggest that mummy portraits actually were known throughout much of the country.

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Educational Programs
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum offered a variety of educational programs and resources, including lectures, family programs, and gallery talks.

An audio tour, part of the Metropolitan's new Key to the Met Audio Guide, was available for rental in the Museum's Great Hall.

The Key to the Met Audio Guide program was sponsored by Bloomberg News.

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Exhibition Publication
A catalogue—Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt, by Susan Walker (Editor) and Morris Bierbrier—accompanied the exhibition and is available in the online Met Store.

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