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Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt
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Portrait of a young woman, ca. A.D. 70.Encaustic on wood. Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. BPK, Berlin, by Margaret Büsing.
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More about Mummy Portraits
Scholars recently have described the society for whose members the mummy portraits were painted as one in which the individual played a number of different roles, according to their activities and functions. People may have felt as Greeks in the gymnasium, as Romans in administrative roles, and as Egyptians in their village communities, and when venerating the gods or contemplating the afterlife. This situation must have caused considerable tension in the society, but it may be one of the factors that make the painted portraits such important works of art. A present-day artist, Euphrosyne C. Doxiadis, succinctly described this aspect of the paintings in the exhibition catalogue: "Of these two strands [the Greek painting tradition and Egyptian funerary beliefs], the sophistication of the first and the intensity of the second combined to produce moments of breathtaking beauty and unsettling presence."
The technique used in painting the majority of mummy portraits is called encaustic (Greek for "burnt in"). This term, used by ancient authors, is somewhat misleading, because heat is not absolutely necessary to attain the effects seen in the encaustic panels. Therefore, encaustic has come to mean any painting method in which pigment is mixed with beeswax. Researchers have found that a great variety of methods were used to achieve the desired effects in the encaustic paintings: hot or cold wax, under-painting with various colors, and a variety of soft or hard tools that were used cold or heated. To the modern viewer, part of the attraction of encaustic paintings is their similarity to oil painting, since the wax medium could be applied in thick layers showing a great variety of tool marks and free brush strokes. An important characteristic of encaustic mummy portraits is the use of wafer-thin gold leaf. In some pieces, the entire background is gilded, in others, wreaths and fillets are added, and jewelry and garment decoration is emphasized.
Another painting technique found in mummy panel portraits is tempera, in which pigments are mixed with water-soluble binding agents, most frequently animal glue. Tempera portraits are painted on light or dark grounds in bold brush strokes and fine hatching and cross-hatching. Their surface is matte, in contrast to the glossy surface of encaustic paintings. This style of painting — which has antecedents in ancient Egyptian painting of Pharaonic times—calls for sure draftsmanship, and has been described as "calligraphic." Since the faces in tempera paintings usually are shown frontally, and the complex treatment of light and shadow is less prominent than in the encaustic works, tempera painting may be linked more closely to indigenous Egyptian artistic traditions. There are, however, many indications that the mummy portrait painters using the tempera technique were strongly influenced by the paintings in encaustic. In addition, some works were created in a mixed encaustic and tempera technique. It is not known whether the same painters used all of the methods (encaustic, tempera, and mixed).
Mummy portrait panels consisted of a variety of woods—indigenous (sycamore), imported (cedar, pine, fir, cypress, oak), and possibly imported, but also growing in Egypt at the time (lime, fig, and yew). Some portraits are painted on linen stiffened by glue.
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