These 2000 year old portraits seem painted yesterday

At funerals and cremations it is now customary to show a photo montage of the deceased on a large screen. The chest is usually already closed; the body is still there, but it is dead and deathly – and one prefers not to think about the worms, no bacteria and the decomposition process that makes that body less and less like the person you knew. Apparently it takes ten years for a body to be 'skeletonized'. Fortunately, we still have the photos, although they only satisfy the needs of one sense. Would there be a market for a perfume that smells like a loved one?

In Jericho they didn't have pictures yet, 9,500 years ago. There, relatives kept the skulls of the dearly departed above ground, smeared them with plaster and painted them. Some still have teeth. Shells were placed in the eye sockets. They probably also received a wig, although it has not been preserved.

The skulls from Jericho are sometimes called the first or oldest known portraits. The same type of shells were not always used for the eyes. Sometimes the eyes are inlaid with pieces of shell, sometimes with a whole one, on which an iris and pupil were sometimes painted. Cowrie shells, with a horizontal stripe in the middle, give the portrait a dreamy appearance. People still sometimes have eyes like that. This shell gives you eyelashes as a gift, those are those brown lines on either side of the horizontal opening. It's like seeing a Picasso at work.

It is easy to see in these skulls the beginnings of sculpture, or one of the beginnings – just as the alphabet was invented in several places, so too must have been art. Cuneiform script and hieroglyphs; drawings and sculptures.

An exhibition of mummy portraits is now on display in the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam. This is the first time that an exhibition has been dedicated to these portraits in the Netherlands, even though Allard Pierson owns a large number of them, as does the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden.

The mummy portrait combines two traditions, that of mummifying bodies from Egypt and that of Greek and Roman portraits on panel. They were made for the elite of partly Greek descent who lived in Egypt, then a Roman province. What is special is that many women and children were also painted. The names of a few people have also remained known, the profession of a few, and in very few cases both, such as 'teacher Hermione'.

Panel paintings from classical antiquity have not been preserved, making the mummy portraits now the oldest surviving examples of portrait painting. About a thousand of the mummy portraits are now known. They were made from about 2,100 years ago and mainly excavated in the nineteenth century; especially in the Fayum region, not far from Cairo.

Also read
Opening Grand Egyptian Museum is really good news

The realism of the portraits is stunning, much in the same way that the animals in Lascaux, Chauvet and Sulawesi (Leang Tedongnge) caves are stunning. So old and so good! But now they are not animals but people, who look at you as if you were standing in front of a mirror. Full frontal and unashamed. The question of whether there is progress in art is immediately ridiculed by the best portraits.

Liquid wax

The portraits painted with liquid wax in particular look as if the painter has just put down his brushes and spatulas – with which the thick layer of colored wax was cut, for example for hatching. „The Fayoum portraits touch us, as if they have been painted last month,” wrote British art critic John Berger. „Why? That's the riddle.”

It's a mystery that can't be solved no matter how much you learn about the portraits, and you can learn a lot at this great exhibition. Not only are there 38 mummy panel portraits on display (six of which are from our own collection and six from the RvO), but also pigments, brushes and spatulas, sculptures, toys, jewelry, perfume bottles, texts on pieces of papyrus, coins; in short, everything that can shed archaeological light on the subjects, the portraitists and the society in which they lived. There are also videos in which an attempt is made to make a mummy portrait, from choosing the wood for the panel, and there is an audio tour in which artist Jasper Krabbé as a painter looks at the portraits, one with more talent and inventiveness than the other.

Despite all this information, the mystery remains intact. What if the portraits were indeed painted yesterday? Would people still love them that way? It is precisely the fact that they appear modern but are not that determines their greatness. Fortunately, in art riddles do not have to be solved. Everything is in pretend.

Thin layer of dust

Meanwhile, the fact that the portraits were actually attached to the mummified body of the deceased is somewhat lost from view. The portrait was separated from the original only by a thin layer of dust. But most portraits were removed from their mummies by traders and archaeologists and sold separately. Perhaps the finders did not realize how special such an ensemble was. Perhaps they did not care and fell for the similarity of the portraits to paintings common in the West, which were also easier to sell on their own and ended up in all kinds of museums. There were also fully painted shrouds and mummy masks attached to mummy coffins, but these are less known. Let us now dream for a moment of a large museum in Fayum, where all the thousand surviving mummy portraits are exhibited.

Like the skulls in Jericho, the mummies probably remained among the living for some time, in a chapel or at home, where they stood upright. A child has made a drawing on the wrappings of one mummy. After a few months, the mummies were interred and could only be seen by the gods.

When were the portraits painted, during life or after death? In the latter case, they are reminiscent of photographs from the 19th century, which were sometimes taken of dead people, as if they were still alive. Often they were small children, and it was the first photo of the child, the last opportunity to preserve a likeness. Some children have their eyes open, sometimes the eyes are drawn later on the photo.

According to the catalogue, the mummy portraits were made immediately after death, but this is not certain. For example, in some portraits the hairstyle has been changed and adapted to the latest fashion. If they were painted after death, the question remains whether the deceased had their eyes closed. Perhaps it was not customary in Egypt at that time to close the eyes of a deceased person, perhaps it was the talent of the painters, who may never have seen the person portrayed alive, to open those closed eyes again. Perhaps that is why they were painted so large. It is precisely the look in the eyes that is so lively and penetrating in the mummy portraits. As if they are looking at us.

Coffee mugs

It is also still questionable how similar the portraits were. It has been suggested that the artists could follow various templates, to which one or more individual characteristics were added. Not portraits, but tronies, as faces of recognizable types such as beggars or cheerful drunkards were called in the 17th century in the Netherlands. Well, who knows? Most people are just alike, some just a little more than others. The Egyptian photographer Aya Abdel Rahman searched for people in modern Egypt who strongly resembled a Fayum portrait and photographed them next to their two-thousand-year-old counterparts. In the Fayum itself, mummy portraits are ubiquitous, including murals and coffee mugs, for tourists but also for the residents themselves. Now that museum with originals…

In 2016, the British Museum had a portrait bust made of their Jericho skull using the latest techniques. „The face of a man that lived and died over 9,500 years ago can now be seen for the first time since his plaster likeness was created in ancient Jericho”, the website cheers. But the head lacks the magic of the original; all the as if disappeared. A reconstruction can also be seen in the Allard Pierson. Behind a wall lies the mummy of a child with the portrait still attached to it. The child lies behind a wall – exhibiting human remains is no longer self-evident and if it does happen, the visitor must at least be offered the opportunity to ignore it (the museum also mentions that the word mummy – is often used in Western pop culture seen as a kind of zombie – is not uncontroversial, but it is used).

Those who do not object to it will see a face on the mummy that does not resemble the 3D reconstruction. Using a CT scan, it was determined that the body in the bandages was probably already skeletonized before it was mummified and that the deceased was much younger than the portrait suggests. A mystery and a romantic longing: this is how the parents imagined their son, in their now, five years after his death. As if he hadn't died.

To share





Email the editor