Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
REVIEW BY J PETER PHILLIPS
This seminal work was first published by Thames & Hudson in 1995. The reprint is described by the publishers as a ‘compact hardback edition’ and includes a new foreword by Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian novelist and cultural commentator. It includes 274 illustrations, of which 124 are colour plates. The best of the portraits are true masterpieces, recalling the self-portraits of Rembrandt, and bringing to life the cosmopolitan elite of Egypt during the Roman Period. As the author points out, the term ‘Fayum Portraits’ is slightly misleading shorthand: although many of the coffins to which the wooden portrait panels were attached were discovered by Flinders Petrie on the edge of the Fayum (in the necropolis beside the Hawara Pyramid), some 1,000 have been found in a variety of other locations.
Ms Doxiadis is a Greek artist, and her commentary on the portraits is very much influenced by her own professional experience. She examines in detail such things as the colour palette and pattern of brush strokes, and makes stylistic comparisons with the work of world-famous artists. She has studied the huge corpus of portraits for many years, and her knowledge of Egyptology is also extensive. She includes a wealth of information about society and religion in Egypt during the Roman Period, and about the find-sites of the portraits and the history of their discovery. They do not fit easily into the standard classification of museum objects: they may be lodged among the ancient Egyptian, the Classical, or even the Coptic artefacts. Because of this, she feels that their contribution to the history of art has not been properly acknowledged.
The text reveals a number of surprising facts: the portraits are painted in a number of different media – hot wax, cold wax, and tempera – mostly on wooden panels, but some on linen; they were painted by artists who were trained in an ancient Greek tradition that long pre-dates their work among the Roman elite who employed them; many of the portraits seem to have been displayed in the homes of their sitters for many years before being incorporated in their coffins after death, while others (such as those of infants) must have been hastily painted after death.
The colour plates are grouped by find-site in four sections, and the text refers to them by number, picking out aspects that the author wishes to illustrate. It is difficult to envisage any other way in which this could be achieved, but the reader must continuously turn pages back and forth to view the images, which can be irritating. The black-and-white images, however, are conveniently interspersed throughout the text, and a long chapter is devoted to commentaries on each of the portraits in turn.
The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt
by Euphrosyne Doxiadis
Thames & Hudson, 2024
ISBN 978-0-500-02794-3
HARDBACK, £40
Win a copy of this book in our photo competition!
