In the first three centuries A.D., in a fertile district of Roman Egypt called the Fayum, a diverse community of Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Syrians, Libyans, Nubians, and Jews flourished. These people, and many of their contemporaries throughout the Nile Valley, embalmed the bodies of their dead and then placed over the faces portraits painted on wooden panels or linen. These paintings, today known as Fayum, or mummy, portraits, were created to preserve the memory of each individual. The Fayum portraits are by far the most important body of portraiture to have survived antiquity. Reproduced in this arresting book are some 180 of the finest of the more than 1,000 extant images - of men, women, and children, young and old, plain and beautiful - all of whom seem uncannily alive. A few of these faces have become familiar to scholars and museum-goers, but as a whole they have been neglected by art historians and will be new to most readers.
Originally published to accompany the major British Museum exhibition "Ancient Faces" in 1997, Euphrosyne Doxiadis' acclaimed book
The Mysterious Fayum Portraits, Faces from Ancient Egypt is now available in paperback.
In 31BC the Romans succeeded the Greeks to become rulers of Egypt. Egyptian burial practices, including mummification, persisted despite Roman supremacy, but by the 1st century AD the Romans had added something of their own--portraits, painted in a Greek naturalistic style to preserve the memory of the individual for the mummy's future life. Over 1000 of these fascinating portraits have been discovered over the course of the last two centuries, the majority of which were found in Fayum, a lush, green area to the south of Cairo. It is for this reason that the paintings are known collectively as the Fayum Portraits. Until Doxiadis began her extensive research, the portraits had been languishing in virtual obscurity, scattered ad hoc in collections throughout Europe. As the author points out, they have been neglected by academics as, victims of their multicultural heritage, they belong to Egyptology and Classicism in equal measure and as a result have often been ignored by both disciplines. Doxiadis' approach is insightful in that she draws on her own background to look at the portraits from the point of view of the painter. Portraits are grouped according to where they were found and explanatory text sets them in their social, historical and geographical context. She shows great sensitivity to style and technique, drawing valid comparisons between the anonymous portrait painters and the likes of Rembrandt, Modigliani and Picasso. One of the greatest achievements of this stunning book is that the author has managed to bring the disparate collection together to be viewed as a body of work. The book contains over 100 exquisite colour plates where the faces of antiquity gaze out from the pages. The mystery that surrounds the portraits is part of their attraction; we can draw limited conclusions based on dress, hair styles and jewellery but for the most part these men, women and children are anonymous faces in the crowd reaching the viewer across time, "glowing with a flame of immortal life". --Sarah Crawford
