Long before Leonardo created the Mona Lisa, African artists in ancient Egypt during the Greco-Roman period (332 BCE to 395 CE) were making highly-rendered portraits that communicated the mystery and humanity of their subjects. Fayum Mummy Portraits were painted with paint brushes using encaustic (wax-based) paints on wooden panels and then, as the name suggests, placed over the faces of the case housing the mummified remains of the recently deceased. Check out this stunner:
Fayum Mummy Portraits are criminally under-appreciated. I like to show images of these paintings in my beginning painting classes on the first day of instruction in part to make the point that many cultures and peoples have made remarkably naturalistic paintings—long before the Renaissance.
Both the subjects of these works and many of the artists as well were living in Egypt during a time of cultural and racial diversity. Since ancient times Egypt has been a hub of cultural activity and migration (as genetic testing of mummies has indicated1). The subjects of the surviving mummy portraits are Egyptians, Romans, Greeks and Middle-Eastern peoples.
I wish I could say that these paintings were highly influential. This does not seem to be the case. Rather, knowledge of the paintings was largely lost to the public until the 19th century when they began to turn up here and there. These portraits are still relatively unknown for a few reasons including:
Few of these portraits remain
Not much information remains, either. Many of these wooden panels were looted and moved around so much that the records are fragmented or missing.
Bias against non-European or non-Western art
Bias against narratives that don’t fit neatly into contemporary racial binaries of black and white (or the cultural binaries of European and non-European)
A preference for the tidy narrative that Renaissance masters “invented” perspective, naturalism and even portraiture (and especially portraiture of non-religious subjects).
But for precisely these same reasons we should take the time to look at these paintings—and the fact that they are just damn good paintings. So the project of appreciating them and learning about them continues. Let’s dig a little deeper.
The Fayum (also spelled Faiyum) river basin or oasis is one of the first places where Egyptians farmed. When Cleopatra and Mark Antony committed suicide in 30 BCE Augustus (Octavian) took over and annexed Egypt into the Roman Empire. During the next few hundred years while these paintings were being made there was a lot of mixing of both Greek and Roman traditions with Egyptian ones. Even though Romans typically liked to cremate the dead, during this time the Egyptian tradition of embalming continued. And this is lucky for us, because the area happens to be so hot and dry that the surviving portraits were preserved along with the mummies. Although panel painting was happening all over the ancient world these mummy portraits represent the best still existing collection of panel painting from ancient times. It’s difficult to think about this fact without also wondering what thousands of other paintings from thousands of years ago looked like. We will never know! So let us celebrate and marvel together at a few of the ones we still do have.
In this next painting, look at the confidence of the brushwork, the way each stroke follows the contours of the face (like Van Gogh’s self-portraits), the subtle shifts of value and tone, and the cast shadow across the neck. Masterful, volumetric painting of a boy from 2000 years ago:
In these paintings we see not only the painting of the subject, we seem to see the subjects themselves. For the Egyptians I am convinced that this was a primary motivation, collapsing that distance between represented and representation. This is a safe assumption because the tension between reality and representation is part of our human story. From VR headsets today stretching all the way back to the Byzantine iconoclasm and into prehistory, people have always been interested in representing reality with whatever tools and technologies were available, and in pushing it as far as it could go. For the people living in ancient Egypt, wax and pigment enabled them to see the visages of their loved ones live on after death. In the absence of photography or other image-making tools these portraits must have been absolutely magical. Indeed, they still are.
Portraiture has the power to capture and communicate a person’s essence. To make them real, vivid, approachable yet somehow removed. To freeze time and allow us inside of it. Of course a lot of more widely-known European portraiture is exceptional. But the same mystique and aura of the Mona Lisa et al can be found in these mummy portraits too: who was she? How did she die? What did she have for dinner? Is that a smile? In a time when many artists are questioning the inherited, colonialist narratives of old art history books, Fayum Mummy Portraits offer a simple and powerful counterpoise.
Love them. Share them!
Schuenemann VJ, Peltzer A, Welte B, van Pelt WP, Molak M, Wang CC, Furtwängler A, Urban C, Reiter E, Nieselt K, Teßmann B, Francken M, Harvati K, Haak W, Schiffels S, Krause J. Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods. Nat Commun. 2017 May 30;8:15694. doi: 10.1038/ncomms15694. PMID: 28556824; PMCID: PMC5459999.