Due to the hot dry Egyptian climate, the paintings are frequently very well preserved, often retaining their brilliant colors seemingly unfaded by time. The majority were found in the necropolis of Fayum. The former are usually of higher quality.ĭetail of a portrait within its mummy wrappings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, discovered by Flinders Petrie in 1911.Ībout 900 mummy portraits are known at present. Two groups of portraits can be distinguished by technique: one of encaustic (wax) paintings, the other in tempera. In terms of artistic tradition, the images clearly derive more from Greco-Roman artistic traditions than Egyptian ones. They usually depict a single person, showing the head, or head and upper chest, viewed frontally. Extant examples indicate that they were mounted into the bands of cloth that were used to wrap the bodies.Īlmost all have now been detached from the mummies. The portraits covered the faces of bodies that were mummified for burial. They are among the largest groups among the very few survivors of the panel painting tradition of the classical world, which continued into Byzantine, Eastern Mediterranean, and Western traditions in the post-classical world, including the local tradition of Coptic iconography in Egypt. It is not clear when their production ended, but recent research suggests the middle of the 3rd century. The portraits date to the Imperial Roman era, from the late 1st century BC or the early 1st century AD onwards. This heavily gilt portrait was found in winter 1905/06 by French Archaeologist Alfred Gayet and sold to the Egyptian Museum of Berlin in 1907.
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