Fayum Mummy Portraits
First to fourth century AD
A young man looks straight at you with large dark eyes, curly hair and the shadow of a first beard, painted with such directness that he could be someone you passed in the street this morning. He has been dead for about eighteen hundred years. Portraits like this were painted in Roman Egypt to be bound into the linen wrappings over the face of a mummy, and they were found in cemeteries around the Fayum oasis south west of Cairo, which gives them their name. The Pushkin Museum has one of the best groups outside Egypt, London and Berlin.
Most of them are painted in encaustic, pigment mixed into hot beeswax, laid on with a brush and a heated metal tool. Look closely at the surface: the wax stands up in little ridges in the hair and catches the light in the highlights on the nose and eyes, exactly as a modern oil painting does. Others are in tempera, flatter and more graphic. Notice the Roman hairstyles, the gold wreaths and the jewellery, which let scholars date each portrait to within a few decades by comparing them with fashions at the imperial court.
The Moscow portraits came largely through the Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev, whose collection of some six thousand Egyptian objects was bought by the Russian state in 1909 and became the founding core of the museum's antiquities department. They matter because they are the only large body of ancient panel painting to survive anywhere; the famous painters of Greece and Rome are all lost, and these workshop artists in a provincial Egyptian town are the closest we can get to them. Stand in front of one and it is hard not to feel that the sitter is looking back.
Did You Know? Many portraits were painted while the sitter was still alive and hung in the house for years before being cut down to fit the mummy.
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