New Directions for Research on Ancient Romano-Egyptian Panel Paintings

An international collaborative project on artistic materials and practice in antiquity reaches an important milestone

A close up of a mummy portrait featuring a woman with gold jewelry.

Mummy Portrait of a Woman, AD 100, attributed to Isidora Master. Encaustic on linden wood, gilt, linen, 18 7/8 × 14 3/16 × 5 1/16 in. Getty Museum. 81.AP.42

By Marie Svoboda

Sep 10, 2018

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Approximately 1,000 mummy portraits survive from antiquity.

Originally buried with the mummified bodies of the deceased, these ancient paintings bring modern viewers face to face with people who lived in Roman Egypt 2,000 years ago.

Although Romano-Egyptian funerary portraits are well published, the primary aim of scholarship to date has been to understand the individuals depicted on the panels. Less explored are the physical aspects of the works: Who made them? How did artists’ workshops function? What technologies were used to fabricate these paintings?

An international collaboration known as APPEAR (Ancient Panel Paintings, Examination, Analysis and Research) launched in 2013 to investigate these questions, and is still going strong. Today fully 35 museums are participating in APPEAR, and have together contributed over 200 entries to a shared project database containing technical, scientific, and historic information on individual portraits. This effort not only promotes comparison of specific artifacts across collections, but also helps to develop a broader understanding of artistic materials and practice in the ancient world.

Composite image of a mummy panel painting of a woman. At left her face is dark blue and shroud is bright pink. At right her face is light blue-green and shroud is yellow-green.

Mummy Portrait of a Young Woman, about AD 170–200, Romano-Egyptian. At left, photographed with ultraviolet light revealing bright pink fluorescence diagnostic of madder lake. At right, false color infrared image revealing magenta and green colors diagnostic of indigo and red ochre respectively.  Tempera on wood, 13 3/4 × 8 3/8 in. Getty Museum. 81.AP.29

Conference and Current Research

In May 2018 we marked the conclusion of the first phase of APPEAR with a two-day conference at the Getty Villa. Over 100 attendees, including project partners, conservators, scientists, Egyptologists, curators, educators, and enthusiasts of ancient art and technology, came together for two days of study. Full proceedings will be published next year.

The conference began with a keynote lecture by Susan Walker, co-curator of the pivotal 1997 exhibition Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt. This exhibition and its catalogue were significant in introducing the public to these hauntingly beautiful funerary portraits.

The first day of presentations and discussions highlighted collaborative research across museums, illuminating the advances that derive from analyzing funerary portraits across institutions and in contrast to other funerary artifacts. Presentations delved into collecting, provenance, and historic archives, and revealed intriguing new approaches, such as a method for examining similarities in facial features within collections.

Topics included:

  • Provenance and the history of mummy portrait collecting, including dealer stamps and seals that reveal how mummy portraits entered museum collections
  • Fusion of influences in Romano-Egyptian portraits—Greek ancestry, Roman identity, and Egyptian burial customs
  • Technical study and imaging of an Egyptian panel painting of the heron god
  • Iconographic and paleographic analysis intended to clarify the distinction between authentic and forged ancient paintings
  • Comparison of mummy portraits with contemporaneous shields, which represent rare surviving examples of painted wood from antiquity
  • Preliminary findings about binding media used on funerary portraits
  • Identification of artists’ workshops through comparative study of a well-provenanced group of portraits

The second day of presentations focused on the investigation of materials used by the ancient artist and how we can identify them today. Materials under investigation include both the wooden panels themselves and the colorants used to decorate them, such as madder lake, Egyptian blue, indigo, and a complex palette of green pigments. Conservation science techniques, including analytical instrumentation and technical imaging, are offering exciting and innovative directions for non-destructive identification of such materials in mummy portraits.

Papers on day two addressed:

  • Multispectral imaging (MSI) techniques allowing the visualization and spatial localization of materials under different wavelengths of illumination
  • Discovery of previously unobserved “invisible brushstrokes” using visible-induced visible luminescence (VIVL) imaging
  • Characterization and localization of the pigment indigo via multiband reflectance image subtraction
  • Identification of wood via electron microscopy, confirming the predominance of European timber imported into Egypt
  • Geographical and temporal distribution of Egyptian blue used in ancient portraits
  • Identification of madder pigments and colorants by fluorescence and liquid chromatography
  • Analysis of green pigments on Romano-Egyptian artifacts and their evolution across the Hellenistic and Roman periods

The day ended with a thoughtful presentation on terminology, emphasizing how, through collaborative investigations and the accumulation of new and more accurate data, we may need to rethink how we describe the ancient practices we thought we once knew.

Exhibition and Publication

A tenet of the APPEAR project is that examining the physical remains of the ancient world provides us with a tangible link to ancient people and their lives. It was exciting to see that promise realized through the cutting-edge work of fellow conservators, art historians, and scientists.

Conference attendees went away excited, invigorated, and inspired about the study of ancient painted funerary artifacts and the journey ahead in better understanding them. With the goal of developing a trend for further collaborative research, bridging information, and thinking outside of a bubble, APPEAR has become a model project.

The conference concluded with an overview of the two days by the Getty’s associate curator Mary Louise Hart and the announcement of an exhibition on funerary artifacts and portraiture, proposed for 2021 at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam, where the next APPEAR conference is proposed to be hosted.

Our dedicated APPEAR Project page provides more information on the project, including a bibliography, list of participating institutions, and an image gallery. An overview document that summarizes the statistical information available in the database will be made available in the fall of 2018, and full papers from the conference will be published online by Getty Publications in 2019.

Side-by-side comparison of a funerary portrait of a man shot in two lights revealing invisible brushstrokes in his beard and hair.

Detail of a funerary portrait of a young man, early third century, Egyptian. Left: Visible light image. Right: Visible-induced visible luminescence (VIVL) image revealing “invisible brushstrokes” probably corresponding to a madder-based pigment. Tempera on wood panel. Photograph © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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