Mummy portraits of Roman Egypt

[guy]

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Between the 1st and 3rd centuries A.D., many people in Roman Egypt chose to have a naturalistic portrait of themselves, painted on a wood panel or cloth shroud, incorporated into the wrappings that encased their mummified bodies.

Here is an interesting article of the wooden or cloth portraits found on Ancient Egyptian mummies:

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More than 1,000 mummy portraits, painted on wood panels or cloth shrouds between the first and third centuries A.D., are in museums today. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, archaeologists unearthed scores of these portraits, primarily at cemeteries in and around the Fayum region of Lower Egypt. Excavators often removed the panels or shrouds from the mummies, discarded the bodies, and sold the portraits to institutions throughout Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As a result, scholars have almost exclusively studied the portraits as works of art divorced from their archaeological and funerary contexts. They have focused their efforts on researching stylistic elements and establishing the identities and ethnicities of the deceased, whose names and biographies rarely survive. Few researchers have investigated how the paintings were made.

 

https://www.archaeology.org/issues/451-2201/features/10182-egypt-mummy-portraits?utm_source=Archaeological+Institute+of+America&utm_campaign=c8c3091934-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_01_24_03_30&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_640baf0738-c8c3091934-216793544&mc_cid=c8c3091934&mc_eid=e9533ea02e

 

Here is a previous thread about the portraits found in Ancient Egypt:

 

 

Edited January 26, 2022 by guy