When the French Daniel Marie Fouquet heard of the discovery in 1887, he went to re-inspect the necropolis discovered, but found only two portraits. Although his published studies are not entirely up to modern standards, they remain the most important source for systematic excavation. Most of these portraits are on display in Cairo and London museums. He found 81 portraits in a Roman necropolis, and showcased them at an exhibition in London. In 1887, the British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie started excavations at Hawara. The lack of literature on those Faiyum Portraits owes to many reasons, most importantly is that they were painted by unknown artists, and were scattered across the world, sometimes in the same museum, among the Egyptian, Greek, and Coptic halls. With the abolishment of mummification in the 3rd century AD, that art had gone, especially with the emergence of Coptic iconography, which is a natural extension of the Egyptian art in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, and thus, considering those faces a part of the Coptic art.Īlthough some of those portraits had been found in areas far from Faiyum, such as Saqqara, El Alamein, and Sheikh Abadah, they were named after Faiyum because most of them had been found in the Faiyoum basin, particularly from Hawara to central Egypt. Historians had unanimously agreed that panel painting in Egypt had started at early 1st century BC, when the ancient Egyptian had been painting pictures of his dead on wooden boards attached to mummies. Thus, these portraits are a mixture of the three civilizations Pharaonic, Greek, and Roman. However, he believed them to be real faces that correspond to reality, or represent a midway between life and death. French philosopher and novelist André Malraux described them as faces looking forward to eternal life. The images are unique with their calm and timeless looks. They are not just traditional funerary paintings, but portraits of the persons inside the coffin. Due to the hot dry climate, the paintings are very well preserved. Over four centuries, 900 mummy portraits were discovered in the necropolis of Faiyum. Archaeological finds followed, and some mummies with portraits were transported to Europe, which are now in the Albertinum in Dresden, Germany. More than four centuries ago, specifically in 1615 AD, the Italian explorer Pietro Della Valle discovered the first of the mummy portraits. Despite disagreement upon the nature of those faces Egyptian, Greek, Roman, or even Byzantine, the names written on them are Greek, while clothes, hairstyles and ornaments are Roman. ![]() They depict the entire faces of persons lived more than 2000 years ago frontally, while some of them turned to the left slightly. ![]() These paintings, which were found attached to mummies dating back to the Roman era in Faiyum, are unique, and by which Egypt had opened up to the outside world after it had been kept to itself. They were a breakthrough from the conventional Egyptian painting, and by which Egypt had opened up to the outside world after keeping to itself. ![]() For the first time in history, and instead of depicting the person laterally, even if the body was drawn from the front or the back, as shown in Pharaonic temples’ paintings, Faiyum portraits depict the person frontally.
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