Between the first and third centuries CE, workshops near the Faiyum oasis painted lifelike faces on wood so one woman — and a thousand others — would still be known in the next world.
In Roman Egypt, between the first and third centuries CE, workshops near the Faiyum oasis painted faces that were meant to outlast the body. Tempera or encaustic, a hot wax mixed with pigment, went onto thin wood panels that were then set over or into the mummy wrappings. The style blended Egyptian burial belief with Greco-Roman lifelike portraiture: a person had to be recognizable in the next world, so the painter worked from life or from memory while the features were still known. Roughly a thousand of these Fayum mummy portraits survive in museums worldwide. As Ancient Origins put it in a recent post, a workshop once painted a face so one woman would still be recognized beyond death; today that same face is a museum stop, and visitors queue to look her in the eye.
From Burial Aid to Museum Stop
Scholars sometimes call the makers death-artists, a nickname that fits the job without meaning they only painted for tombs. The panels show men, women, and children with dark eyes, jewelry, and clothes that feel startlingly close, not stiff gods but neighbors from a busy province of Rome. Collections at the Metropolitan Museum Ancient Faces galleries, the British Museum, and the Getty APPEAR project have conserved and studied many of them, proving how durable the wax and wood can be. The Met's mummy mask of a woman from about 60 to 70 CE is one quiet example of that tradition. What began as a burial aid became, two thousand years later, a rare chance to meet someone who lived under the Caesars and still seems ready to speak.
Which face from the ancient world would you most want to look in the eye?
Interesting peice on the Fayum faces but one line stuck out for me. You say scholars sometimes call the painters death-artists and I cant find that nickmane in the museum or research writing Ive checked. The Getty APPEAR project, Susan Walkers Ancient Faces catalouge, and the usual overviews of Fayum mummy portraits talk about funerary or mummy portraits made by mostly anonymous workshop painters, sometimes given style names like the Saint Louis Painter. They dont seem to use death-artists as a real scholarly label. The dating from about the first to third centurys CE and the count of roughly nine hundred to a thousand surviving panels does line up with those same sources. Where did you see death-artists used by actual scholars, or was that more a modern nickmane?