![]() ![]() Stylistic likenesses between portraits have also become clearer as data coalesces. Some scholars also hypothesize that varying panel shapes and sizes (some have rounded corners, while others are diagonal some are thick, others thin) may denote the methods of a particular workshop or region. ![]() For instance, the skilled application of tempera and encaustic paint-sometimes both on a single panel-indicates a transference of technique from one artist to another in a studio setting. Several point to the formalization of artistic workshops during the 1st and 3rd centuries C.E., when most mummy portraits were created. ”Īs museums continue to populate the APPEAR database with new research, Svoboda and her collaborators have begun to draw conclusions. “So these developments have been enormous in advancing the understanding of. “Before, you had to take a very large sample to identify the pigment or wood, and with these precious objects, you can’t really do that most institutions won’t allow it,” explained Svoboda. Ultraviolet illumination, infrared reflectography, radiography, and other imaging methods let conservators scan and characterize materials without having to extract samples from the delicate works. The project kicked off at a key moment in conservation innovation, when new technologies allowing for less invasive analysis emerged. To aggregate and easily compare information about these works, participating institutions upload details on each painting’s size, materials, inscriptions, tool marks, panel shape, decorative details, and more to a single database. “They weren’t completely Egyptian and they weren’t completely Classical-they were both.”ĪPPEAR is addressing these challenges by bringing together an array of scholars, curators, scientists, and conservators to research a large group of mummy portraits (a handful of which are still attached to their original mummies or bits of shroud). “When they entered collections in the 19th century, mummy portraits were viewed more as curiosities because no one really knew what to make of them,” Svoboda told Artsy. They’d been made in a time of great cultural melding in Egypt, during the Roman occupation, and represent both Egyptian funerary traditions (mummification) and the Romans’ burgeoning experimentation with portraiture and painting techniques like encaustic-a painting method that entails melting beeswax and then adding colored pigments to it. What’s more, the mummy paintings existed in scholarship limbo, falling somewhere between classifications of Roman and Egyptian art. “You’re playing with a very small deck when it comes to actual portraits paired with actual mummies.” “You don’t get the full context,” Marsha Hill, curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explained to Artsy. ![]() ![]() When excavations of Egyptian burial grounds and the subsequent trade of artifacts reached full throttle, in the late 1800s, the portraits were often ripped from the mummies they decorated. Mysteries have begun to be solved, too, though many more have also been unearthed.īefore Svoboda founded APPEAR, mummy portraits had faced myriad scholarship hurdles. Since its official inception in 2013, 41 institutions have come on board to bring together information on around 285 paintings, almost a third of all known mummy portraits. She named it APPEAR, or Ancient Panel Paintings: Examination, Analysis, and Research. So Svoboda conceived of an international, multi-institution research project to cull data from a wider corpus of portraits and begin to untangle these questions. (As far as scholars can tell, the mummy portraits are the first paintings that depict lifelike, highly individualized subjects and demonstrate a fusion of funerary and artistic traditions between the Greco-Roman and Classical worlds.) Svoboda also hoped that the answers to the many open questions surrounding the works would uncover facets of early Egyptian culture, especially in relation to the empire’s trade, economic, and social structure, whose details are still hazy.īut there are approximately 1,000 extant mummy portraits scattered across the globe, and for accurate answers, Svoboda needed information beyond what the Getty’s 16 works could provide. Svoboda knew that an examination of these portraits would reveal important information about a group of artworks considered precursors to the Western painting tradition. ![]()
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