Place: Egypt (Place created)
Date: about 150 – 170
This image is housed at the Getty Villa. This is an educational center and museum dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria. The collection has 44,000 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities dating from 6,500 BC to 400 AD.
–Artist Unknown Encaustic on wood.
Dimensions: Height: 37 cm (14.6 in). Width: 21 cm (8.3 in)
Museum Description of the mummy portrait:
A bearded man gazes out from this Romano-Egyptian mummy portrait. His hairstyle and beard follow the court fashion of the Antonine dynasty, suggesting that this portrait was painted around A.D. 150 to 170. He wears the typical garments of tunic and cloak.
This portrait is a good example of the encaustic technique used for many mummy portraits. The thicker applications of paint on the man’s face and hair, especially on the right side of the face and on the eyebrows, show the marks of the cestrum, a tool similar in function to the modern palette knife, which gave texture to the paint surface.
Currently on view at: Getty Villa, Gallery 206, Arts of Greco-Roman Egypt.
Mummy portraits have been found across Egypt, but are most common in the Faiyum Basin, particularly from Hawara in the Fayum Basin (hence the common name) and the Hadrianic Roman city Antinoopolis. “Faiyum Portraits” is generally thought of as a stylistic, rather than a geographic, description. While painted cartonnage mummy cases date back to pharaonic times, the Faiyum mummy portraits were an innovation dating to the Coptic period on time of the Roman occupation of Egypt.
Hawara is an archaeological site of Ancient Egypt, south of the site of Crocodilopolis (‘Arsinoe’, also known as ‘Medinet al-Faiyum’) at the entrance to the depression of the Fayyum oasis. The first excavations at the site were made by Karl Lepsius, in 1843. William Flinders Petrie excavated at Hawara, in 1888, finding papyri of the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, and, north of the pyramid, a vast necropolis where he found 146 portraits on coffins dating to the Roman period, famous as being among the very few surviving examples of painted portraits from Classical Antiquity, the “Fayoum portraits” illustrated in Roman history textbooks.
The Pyramid of Amenemhat III at Hawara, from the east.
Amenemhat III was the last powerful ruler of the 12th Dynasty, and the pyramid he built at Hawara (illustration, right) is believed to post-date the so-called “Black Pyramid” built by the same ruler at Dahshur. It is this that is believed to have been Amenemhet’s final resting place. At Hawara there was also the intact (pyramid) tomb of Neferu-Ptah, daughter of Amenemhet III. This tomb was found about 2 km South of the king’s pyramid.
Art funéraire – Égypte romaine
Fayum mummy shroud
Another Fayum mummy shroud
Looks like the Greeks adapted to the ancient Egyptian religion but made the Gods in their image.