2000-Year-Old Mummy Portrait Looks Way Ahead of its Time
A funerary portrait from Roman Egypt will go up for sale next week, featuring a strikingly modern-looking male subject with piercing hazel eyes and graying hair.
The painting is one of 900 or so known as the Fayum mummy portraits, created during the 1st and 3rd century AD and placed on the deceased’s mummified bodies like a mask.
Archaeologists found dozens of them in the late 19th century at the Hawara excavation site in Egypt’s Fayum region, and some other examples were known earlier, according to Sotheby’s, but much of the research into them is recent and ongoing.
Though naturalistic and individualized portraits have often been celebrated as a triumph of early Italian masters, this portrait was painted some 1,200 years earlier, in the 1st century AD. Together, the works represent some of the earliest examples of realistic portrait painting still in existence today.
Painted in encaustic using hot beeswax and pigment on a wooden panel, the piece will be a highlight during Sotheby’s Masters Week sales in New York. It could sell for $350,000, according to high estimates, for its skill in rendering both likeness and emotion, from the wrinkles in his skin to his self-assured air.
“It invites you to want to know more about him and to feel his presence,” said Alexandra Olsman, a Sotheby’s specialist in ancient sculpture and works of art. It has been in the collection of Baltimore’s Goucher College for well over a century, acquired by its founder, Reverend John F. Goucher, in 1895. But it has been on a long-term loan with the Walters Art Museum, and has also exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of the Arts, among others.
The auction house has sold upwards of 15 Fayum portraits over the years, but she said this lot is the most compelling one they’ve offered since 2007. That year, a mummy portrait of a young man with curly hair sold for $936,000, more than triple its high estimate. Its loose brushstrokes and the sitter’s deep gaze appeared unusually contemporary.
The painting currently up for sale also stands out for the subject’s age — though his identity remains unknown, he is visibly older than others depicted in mummy portraits, implying he lived a longer life, Olsman said.
It is still unknown whether they were painted deceased, alive, or some mix of the two, she added, but she said she would be surprised if this one was painted after his death, based on the intensity of his presence and his eye contact. Like other subjects of this tradition, he was likely part of the upper class to be able to afford both the mummification process and the artisan who painted them, she said.
The subjects may have also had political or social standing within the Roman Empire, given this type of portraiture “was very much favored among those connected to the Imperial family,” she explained.
The Fayum mummy portraits sit a nexus in art history, representing the artistic traditions of both Ancient Egypt and Rome, as well as those of Greek classical paintings that are largely lost today.
“The realism and the naturalism conveyed in the sitter is coming from a Greek classical painting tradition, of which not much survives,” Olsman said. “It originated in the Mediterranean, which was incredibly humid; paintings were less likely to survive into modernity.”
She calls it a rare window into this tradition. The vivid naturalism achieved in these works was not seen for another millennium, and is often more credited to artists living during the late Middle Ages, including Cimabue and Giotto, who laid the groundwork for the Renaissance.
Olsman recalled when the chairman of Sotheby’s Americas division, George Wachter, first saw the mummy portrait going up for sale this month. “He was like, ‘Why do we keep talking about Giotto and Cimabue, when this guy was doing it 1,200 years before?’” she recalled. “This classical naturalism was happening in painting in the first century — and that’s where we need to start.”
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