Posted on 07/19/2003 4:26:41 PM PDT by blam
Ancient faces' haunting lure
The Fayum portraits are an enigma in terms of classification: Are theyEgyptian, Greek or Roman? Doxiadis' book sheds light on the matter
BY MARK DRAGOUMIS
THE EXHIBITS stare at you. Never have I felt myself being reviewed so fiercely by a show." That is how the Sunday Times art critic described his feelings leaving the Fayum portraits, displayed in the exhibition Ancient Faces at the British Museum from June 1 until July 20, 1997. This is exactly the feeling of those who visit the exhibition of the Fayum portraits now open until 15 July at the Athens Concert Hall (Megaron Mousikis).
These artefacts are unique in the history of art. They mark a turning point in the Egyptians' mortuary practices, as of the first century AD, when mummies became gradually endowed with their portraits. These were depictions of the head and shoulders of the deceased, executed either on wooden tablets and placed under the bandages covering the mummy's face or on the linen shroud itself. They were painted in tempera or in pigments mixed with liquid beeswax. This new funerary cult probably meant to provide a true to life facial representation for the mummy's future life. The traditional belief of the Egyptians in a future life with their physical form intact - the rationale behind mummification - led to the development of this extraordinary art of mummy portraiture. Herodotus used to recount with some relish the Egyptians' obsession with mummification in order to underline the differences between Egypt and Greece. Eventually, however, the two cultures came together and the time came for Greeks to adopt Egyptian practices.
In 332 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and for the next three centuries, the Macedonian dynasty of the Ptolemies ruled the country from its capital Alexandria. In 31 BC, the Romans defeated the last Ptolemaic ruler, Queen Cleopatra VII. Egypt fell to Octavian Caesar but Greek remained the official language. In the cross-cultural Roman Egypt that emerged. For some reason Libyans, Romans, Greeks and Jews all developed a taste for mummy portraits. Ever since these were discovered in the mid-nineteenth century archaeologists and art experts have been wondering: Were these portraits done from life before the person's demise? From the corpse? Possibly from earlier portraits? Should they be classified as Egyptian or Greco-Roman? Can they really be considered as proto-icons anticipating Byzantine religious art?
Such issues have been investigated by a talented Greek painter, Euphrosyne Doxiadis. Her book The Mysterious Fayum Portraits, published by Thames & Hudson, was launched in October 1995 at the Hellenic Centre in London by the then Greek ambassador Elias Gounaris. In her 'Introduction' to this important and beautiful book - now also available in paperback - the author explains that these portraits reached us in such pristine condition, thanks to the hot dry climate of the Fayum region, an area 60km south of Cairo and west of the Nile where families buried their dead.
Portraits buried twice
One of the Fayum portraits that are presently on show at the Megaron Mousikis
These finds are not recent. Several such portraits were discovered in the 1880s but were then dispersed worldwide and ignored. That almost meant they were buried again. This fate they did not deserve. Doxiadis explains how they fell between many stools: "Archaeologists declined to comment on their quality as works of art. Art historians have been shy of archaeology. To Egyptologists they are not Egyptian. To specialists in Greco-Roman art they are. They are strictly too early for Byzantinists who see them as predecessors of icons". She decided to look at them only as a painter. She scoured the world's museums to locate them and included the most representative ones in her book, described by the Times (1-12-95) as "one of the best art books of 1995". "The many astonishingly beautiful faces," wrote Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard, "that greet the reader from the pages of this book are supported by a scholarly text, archaeological, art historical, technical and deeply sensitive."
Andre Malraux was so impressed by the Fayum portraits that he described them as glowing with the flame of immortal life. In their own way, the persons depicted have indeed gained a kind of immortality thanks to these images of themselves painted on encaustic/tempera, on panel or linen, by unknown craftsmen. Doxiadis speculates that one of the reasons why the Fayum portraits - "the most outstanding body of painting to have come down to us from the ancient world" - have until recently remained largely unknown to the general public may be precisely due to the fact that they cannot be attributed to named artists. She calls them "victims of anonymity". She also thinks that the best of the portraits are still purely Greek with their roots in the Alexandrian school... "Under the Romans art, like the official language of the state, remained Greek". The author quotes also the comment of Yannis Tsarouchis - one of the most gifted modern Greek painters - that "to regard the Fayum portraits as Roman is as absurd as saying that all the works I created during the German occupation of Athens were German paintings."
In the case of the portrait of 'Eutyches, freedman of Kasianos' (c 193-211 AD) - according to the inscription written in black on his tunic - the viewer is scrutinised by the extraordinarily vivid, if slightly sad face of a young Greek boy. "The image," notes the author, "executed in thickly textured wax, displays great virtuosity in the Greek tradition of painting." Even if the amazing images contained in this book were not accompanied by an illuminating text (and they are), one could spend hours merely gazing at these alluring faces from the past that seem so modern.
The best craftsmen
'Eutyches' (meaning happy) is but one of many identified Greeks to be found among the Fayum portraits. This is to be expected. Under the Ptolemies, the country prospered, as tracts of rich farmland in the Nile valley were put to good use by the Macedonian military, to whom they were allocated for services rendered. The Greeks may even be over-represented in the Fayum portraits because these cost money and the Macedonians were part of the prosperous classes. 'Pure' Greeks - meaning those whose parents were both Greek - had a name. They were called metropolites ie those coming from the metropolis, the region's administrative centre. A strict procedure of verification called epicrisis that took place when a boy reached the age of fourteen, was necessary for someone to qualify to join the ephebate, the social group of Greek adolescents. This was necessary because the metropolites benefited from certain tax advantages - less so than the Romans but still considerable - and were generally quite prosperous. They could thus afford to hire the best craftsmen in the area for their death portraits.
One of the most remarkable Fayum portraits (encaustic on linen) in this book is that of 'Hermione Grammatike'. The title 'grammatike' (lettered) suggests that she was a teacher of Greek, obviously from a family rich enough to ensure the girl an education, something exceptional even amongst the higher social classes at the time.
The full gamut of human emotions is present in these Fayum portraits, especially of women. Some look subdued, others determined, a few allow themselves a confident trace of a smile and there are also those with a vacant look as if their mind was elsewhere. The eerie quality of these portraits, their "metaphysical potency" as Doxiadis puts it, is, according to her "a combination of their serene 'immortal' gaze with the vividness and animation - in Greek emphasis and enargeia - of the sophisticated Hellenic painting."
The author also points out the striking similarities between the Christian icons of the 6th and 7th centuries, as preserved in St Catherine's monastery of Mount Sinai, and these Fayum portraits. "There can be no doubt," she asserts, "that portraits like those found in the Fayum desert are the forebears of icons."
In a review in the Spectator, William Dalrymple called the book "the best text currently available on late classical portraiture and the origin of the icon." He expressed the hope that her work "will nudge some institution to mount an exhibition to bring together for the first time these much neglected late antique funerary portraits from the different museums across the world in which they are actually dispersed." Two years after this suggestion was made the first such exhibition was mounted at the British Museum. Many followed in various cities all over the world. There are now thousands and thousands of art lovers who have learned to admire these sad faces with their hypnotic stare, their often poignant expressions of grief, their penetrating features and recognisable human emotions so very different from the smooth, bland, idealised faces of classical statuary.
I knew an art teacher from Baltimore that became interested in this tecnique. He did a simple painting in beeswax, left it on his roof exposed to the weather for two years -- but shaded from the sun -- and found that it hadn't faded a bit.
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Omar Shariff is a Copt, and he has those striking, luminous eyes, and the shape of his nose and face remind me of these portraits.
Egyptians were not Arabs.
They were, well....Egyptians.
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