Perhaps more than any other art genre, portrait and figurative arts appeal to our shared humanity. Each face that peers out of a portrait shares emotions and facial expressions familiar to us all—in a stranger’s portrait, we can see ourselves.
A small selection of ancient paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in New York City shows the enduring nature of portraits painted true to life. From afar, some of the fresh faces peering from the portraits look like recent renderings in oil. Yet ancient Egyptian artists painted these portraits more than 1,900 years ago by using encaustic paint, a mixture of beeswax and pigments. With encaustic paint, they achieved fluid, luminous paintings similar to those that 15th-century oil painters created centuries later. Up close, we can see beeswax grooves on the portrait’s surface.
Faiyum Portraits
For 300 years (from the first century to the mid-third century), artists created these portraits throughout Egypt, but especially in the Faiyum oasis, 62 miles southwest of Cairo. The high point of the Faiyum portrait tradition was in the mid-second century.Faiyum portraits are far from the ancient Egyptian art that many of us imagine: wall paintings with flattened, profile-view figures in bright colors alongside hieroglyphics. The artists in Roman-era Egypt painted Faiyum portraits in the Hellenistic style, using light and shade to render each person realistically.
Each panel portrait measures about 17 inches by 9 inches. Each portrait also shows the artist’s skillful ability to mix color when matching the region’s myriad Mediterranean skin tones. The young boy Eutyches’s dark chocolate eyes gaze out of his portrait at us as his lips curl into a smile. He has a full head of dark hair and olive skin that glows and glistens as if under the Mediterranean sun. He appears full of life, even though this portrait marks his death.
In another portrait, downy hair sprouts from a young man’s jaw and upper lip. According to the Met website, Roman Egyptians saw the “incipient mustache” as a man’s “entrance into important social groups and a signal that he was at the prime of sexual attraction and vigor.” Experts believe that the surgical cut in his right eye indicates corrective surgery for a facial deformity, as seen in the youth’s sunken cheek.
A young woman in a red tunic gazes out of her portrait as if she were trying to tell us something. She’s piled her thick curls high on her head, with a few locks escaping down her neck. She’s crowned with a gilded wreath and adorned with gilded earrings; the artist originally gilded the background, too.
In many of these portraits, the artists individually rendered thick eyelashes in an almost naive manner, but this could highlight the significance that eyelashes had at the time. Roman author Pliny (A.D. 23 or 24–79) connected eyelashes to chastity, and wealthy ancient Egyptians applied kohl around their eyes as sunscreen and to emphasize their eyes. Similarly, the artists rendered wrinkles stylistically rather than realistically and gilded wreaths and jewelry in a two-dimensional manner.
Funerary Portraits
Experts believe that artists painted some of these portraits from life, and people displayed them in their homes. However, the Met’s experts found that most of their portraits were painted near or after the person’s death. They believe that mourners carried these portraits in the ekphora, a Greek funeral procession wherein the mourners walked the body through the town or village to the embalmer for mummification. The embalmer trimmed the portrait panels and fitted them on top of the mummy, partially under the wrappings. Sometimes, artists painted the portraits onto glue-stiffened linen.
For months or sometimes years, relatives visited their loved one’s mummy in cemetery chapels for ceremonial celebrations before it was buried.
The Faiyum portraits probably survive today due to their role in funeral rites. According to “The Oxford Companion to Art'' edited by Harold Osborne: “With the exception of some similar examples of portraiture on wall-paintings at Pompeii, destroyed in A.D. 79, the portraits from Egypt are the only surviving examples of the skill and craft of the ancient portrait painter and furnish a unique contribution to the history of art.”
Ultimately, portraiture and figurative arts speak a visual language that anyone anywhere can understand. We’ve enjoyed this visual arts tradition for millennia and, hopefully, for millennia to come.
