Literary and documentary evidence for the existence of portraits in the classical world indicates that they fulfilled similar functions of record and commemoration to those required of them now (Nowicka 1993) and were likewise the object of cultivated collection and display (the decoration of Ptolemy II Philadelphos’ pavilion included ‘‘selected portraits,’’ Ath. 5.196). The legacy in sculpture is copious, but only in Egypt has a large body of painted portraits of the Roman Period survived, mostly painted on thin panels of wood, and preserved by the dry climate and their incorporation from the first to the fourth century ad into the traditional funerary practices designed to preserve the corporeal person of the deceased in order to ensure their commemoration and perpetual existence. The celebrated ‘‘mummy portraits,’’ first associated exclusively with the Fayum but now known to be derived from a number of sites throughout Egypt, were greeted with rapturous enthusiasm when first exhibited in Europe and America, and a series of international exhibitions through the 1990s recreated some of the enthusiasm for these depictions of‘‘real people’’ of antiquity and stimulated new interest in further analysis of their significance (Riggs 2002). The exhibitions coincided with, and built upon, the appearance of a number of significant new publications at that time: the best-illustrated collection of such portraits yet to appear, with a thoughtful commentary and useful grouping of representative portraits by site (Doxiadis 1995); a major new study using Roman portrait sculpture as a comparative aid to dating the portraits by analysis of the subjects’ hairstyles, jewelery, and clothing (Borg 1996); and the completion of Klaus Parlasca’s magisterial four-volume corpus of all known portraits (Parlasca 1969; 1975-1980; Parlasca & Frenz 2003).
Since then many new avenues of research have been opened, the publication of material from individual sites in combination with archival documentation being one especially fruitful avenue (Riggs 2005: 175-244 on the traditionalist material from Western Thebes; Calament 2005, in combination with the record of Antinoopolis items now in the Louvre; Aubertetal. 2008: 346, for list ofitems;Pictonetal. 2007[8], for Petrie’s work at Hawara). By producing additional information to supplement the sometimes scanty record of the earliest excavations, and distinguishing local characteristics, as well as placing the particular forms of portraits, shrouds, and masks within the total range of funerary practices (Riggs 2005), these studies are contributing to the examination of the wider issues of society and religion, in life and death, in Roman Egypt, and much can still be done with the analysis of these portraits.
Some of these portraits had served as lifetime records of their subjects before being subsumed into funerary use, though the proportion of the extant corpus which can definitely be identified as such remains debatable. The ‘‘little portrait’’ (eikonion) sent by Apion, serving with the fleet at Misenum, to his family in Philadelphia in the second century ad (BGUII 423 = Sel. Pap. I, 112; Nowicka 1979: 24) might have looked something like the category of mummy portraits depicting young men in military dress. Even in Egypt, few portraits have survived from an incontestably nonfunerary sphere; the tondo depicting the emperor Septimius Severus and family is the most famous (Berlin Antikensammlung Inv. 31329; Doxiadis 1995: 88).
More frequent survivors than personal portraits are the devotional images which existed either as individual framed pictures or the components of a triptych with folding doors, usually now surviving as disiecta membra. The quality of the representations, which generally combine popular divinities of both local and national interest, is mediocre, showing the characteristics found in the Fayum wall-paintings cited above. A set of three pictures on wood now in the Getty Museum has busts of Isis and Serapis on the narrower panels that would form the wings, and a commemorative image of a man as the central feature (Walker and Bierbrier 1997: 123-4 no.119); whether these three unprovenanced panels really belong together remains unknown. Few panels have come from known contexts: at Tebtunis Rubensohn found two within a house also containing papyri of the late second century; one was still in its frame and fallen from the wall where it had been hanging (Rubensohn 1905: 16-20, pl.1, depicting seated figures of Isis holding Harpokrates, and Souchos), the other just a fragment showing Athena with lance and aegis beside another, lost, military/divine figure (20-21, pl.2, an artist’s copy). Another framed panel of similar composition, showing Min and Soknebtynis, was found in the temple precinct by the Italian mission working at the site in the 1930s (Rondot 1998), and a narrow panel with a bust-length image of Isis, possibly part of a larger picture made of several strips of wood, like the Tebtunis examples, enclosed within a frame whose traces can be seen along the edges, was found within the temple of Tutu at Kellis (Whitehouse and Hope 1999). It had apparently been lost or discarded during the build-up of earth over the stone paving between the middle and end of the fourth century, though the style of the painting suggests that it may date at least a century or more earlier. The corpus of late antique panel paintings being formed by Thomas Mathews and collaborators (Mathews 2001: 170-7; see also Rondot 2001) will help to clarify some of the questions surrounding these, as well as adding to the discussion on the transition from panel paintings to true ‘‘icons.’’
The use of linen as a vehicle for painted pictures is familiar from Pharaonic times, for example in the form of votive cloths and shirts (Pinch 1993: 102-34, pls. 14B-24). The funerary art of Graeco-Roman Egypt made extensive use of linen shrouds to carry the image of the deceased, either depicted in purely traditional guise as an Osiris figure, or incorporating the same style of naturalistic portraiture as the painted panels, in a full-length image of the deceased presented, like the tomb-owners described above, after the manner of contemporary statues, or more surprisingly inserted within a setting of traditional funerary imagery (Riggs 2005: 99 fig. 39; 194-8). A small number of mummy portraits were also executed on linen rather than wood, and there would undoubtedly have been painted hangings in religious and secular use, fulfilling similar functions to the later and better-preserved tapestry-woven or resist-dyed textiles with pictorial content (Kotzsche 2004: 207-8). A rare survivor in this category is a fragmentary polychrome picture depicting a goddess, Isis-Euthenia, holding a shawl full of fruits and raising aloft a glass bowl, an allusion to the celebration of the Nile inundation (New York MMA 1984.178 - Sack et al. 1981; Lilyquist 1985; later painted textiles, Kotzsche 2004: 209-15 ). The background to the figure is a lush garden landscape of trees, similar to the kind familiar from Roman wall-paintings in Italy; in two Pompeian houses, these painted gardens contain Egyptian features such as sphinxes and other pharaonic statues, and small pinakeswith cult scenes (Pompeii I 9, 5: De Vos 1980: 15-21 no. 9, pls. xii-xix; VI17 ins. occ. 42: Naples 2006: 188-91). The ideological importance of garden imagery in ancient Egyptian art has been noted in discussions of the Egyptianizing gardens of Pompeii, but we do not know whether the garden of the Egyptian goddess, who was painted perhaps a century later than the Pompeian decoration, was based upon western models or reflects a truly ‘‘Egyptian garden’’ of the Graeco-Roman Period.
FURTHER READING
For Alexandria, McKenzie (2007: 66-71, 175 fig. 299, 179-84) provides well-referenced summaries of Ptolemaic and Roman mosaics and paintings within their urban context, with annotated city plans, and Tkaczow (1993) lists discoveries up to the early 1990s. Annual reports of the Polish mission’s work at Kom el-Dikka (and further afield) appear in Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean (PAM), and the discoveries of the French mission on land are published in the series Alexandrina and Necropolis, as well as the major journals. For the Fayum, Davoli (1998) provides a site-by-site review of discoveries from the earliest archaeological work on. Reports on the excavations at Kellis in the Dakhla Oasis appear in the Bulletin of the Australian Centre for Egyptology (BACE), and in the Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP) Monograph series (1987-). Up-to-date reports on current work are also available on websites for sites such as the Luxor temple (Http://oi. uchicago. edu/research/projects/epi/), and Amheida, in the Dakhla Oasis (Www. nyu. edu/isaw/amheida). A discussion of techniques and materials is beyond the scope of this chapter, but much new information is coming from research and analysis, as well as excavations: on mosaic tesserae, cements, and the setting of emblemata (e. g. Guimier-Sorbets 1998b, 2005; Guimier-Sorbets & Nenna 1995); on wall-plasters, painting techniques (both fresco and secco ), and pigments (Abd el Salam 2004; Berry 2002; Blondaux 2002; Hope & Whitehouse 2006: 322); and the pigments and types of wood used for panel-paintings (Cartwright 1997; Aubert et al. 2008: 29-40, 41-54). Finally, the range of comparative material in the eastern Mediterranean is growing annually, and extends from Cyrenaica to the Black Sea: for the latter area, a most welcome development is the republication, in a French translation with additional notes and introductory matter, of Mikhail Rostovtzev’s fundamental study of ancient decorative painting in Southern Russia (1913-14; Rostovtseff, tr. Fraysse & Rychtecky, 2004).
World History
