Where are the real People - Fayum Mummy Portraits

If you have ever been dragged around a museum to look at objects from the ancient world you might have found yourself secretly thinking "is this stuff really any good?". Rightly or wrongly many people tend to judge the quality of art on the the perceived level of skill involved and how life-like it looks. And as crude a  measure as this is, when things look like real life they can have a certain magic to them, they can draw us in to empathise with the reality of subject.

Okay many ancient sculptures look life-like and impressive but the majority of ancient murals, reliefs, and pottery show styalised images that can be hard to relate to. I remember a time in the past where I felt a little guilty for being unimpressed by those endless cabinets of flat black figures on Greek vases, they looked alien and a bit simplistic. It was, at that time, hard to fathom the umparralleled technique and skill that went into that pottery and I found myself thinking "Is this really the best they could do?" What did anicent people actually look like? Where were the images of  'real' people, where were the 3D painting techniques the use of perspective or light srouces, for that matter were there any ancient paintings? And even if they did paint surely these too would be creaky 2D images, heavily styalised and looking nothing like real life. I mean didn't it take until Giotto in 13th century Italy before human figures started to look naturalistic and engaging? 

Well the anicent world did have a great many paintings, but paintings are delicate, and delicate things don't  tend to travel well. However, there was a series of extraordinarily striking paintings that did survive - the Fayum Mummy Portraits: 'the only naturallistically coloured portraits to survive from antiquity' (Oxford Classical Dictionary, Portraiture, Roman p.1229). Click on some of the images I have included, zoom in, look at the eyes, and for once your locking in directly to a specific person, their look, their style, their feeling, their raw fucking humanity. No longer does the anicent world require you to keep making up the shortfall with your imagination, with your interpretation, for once it's just playing ball and giving you things are they are. For the first time you are eye to eye with a real person from about 2,000 years ago. Just when you need the the ancient world to cut you a break and provoke your interest, just when you feel there's nothing real to connect with you find the Fayum portraits and your prayers are answered. And as we'll see in later posts when it comes to Fayum it's not just in the field of paintings that that region gives us the rare personal details that we are so desperate for. more background details on fayum etc etc. very naturalistic. not all are this good though.

This is what John Berger has to say about the portraits:

They are the earliest painted portraits that have survived; they were painted whilst the Gospels of the New Testament were being written.  Why then do they strike us today as being so immediate? Why does their individuality feel like our own? Why is their look more contemporary than any look to be found in the rest of the two millenniaof traditional European art which followed them? The Fayum portraits touch us as if they had been painted last month.  Why?  This is the riddle…

Imagine then what happens when somebody comes upon the silence of the Fayum faces and stops short.  Images of men and women making no appeal whatsoever, asking for nothing, yet declaring themselves, and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect.  They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift.

 

However, as with all scholarship into the ancient world just when you feel you're getting somewhere, the rug is suddenly pulled out from under you. Just when you feel you have found the first glimpse into real life someone comes along and says hold on you've got it all wrong. And in this case it's A.J.N.W Prag ('Proportion and personality in the Fayum Portraits', BMSAES 3 (2002), 55-63 http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/bmsaes/issue3/prag.html) who certainly gives us a come down: "On first study the mummy portraits of the Roman period give us a series of likenesses that appear to be carefully worked representations of particular people, but closer analysis has shown that the 'individual' traits are generally simply the quirks of a workshop or painter, emphasised by the repetitive and formulaic use of proportion but often concealed by fashions in hairstyles and beards. What is lacking is the detailed observation of the underlying proportions of the individual skull which gives each face its own personality." And he's right, most of the portraits are variation on a formula, and although at first glance they appeared to be far more engaging and realistic than most ancient images, upon close inspection they are in a way just as generic and abstracted as 2-D vase figures we saw earlier.



 However, Prag can't totally kill off our discovery: "a few portraits stand out by their sheer quality: the acid test of their fidelity would be a reconstruction based on the skull, a test which was carried out in Manchester on two portraits from Hawara now in the British Museum (EA 74713, EA 74718) in the wake of the "Ancient Faces" exhibition. The one proved to be a reasonable likeness as far as detail is concerned but failed in representing the overall proportions of the face, showing that the painter had merely adapted a standard workshop type; the other, although superficially also a standard type, comes much nearer the truth because the artist has rendered the proportions of his subject's face correctly."

Portrait of a man, from Hawara, AD 80–100 (British Museum EA
74718), and a reconstruction of his face. © The Trustees of the British
Museum.

Portrait of a woman, from Hawara, AD 55–70 (British Museum EA 74713), and a reconstruction of her face. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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