Fayum portrait

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In general, subjects are much easier to start than to respond to existing ones. Going, therefore, the path of least resistance - as usual - I offer you a special and very important page in the history of art - the so-called Fayum portrait.

In the 1880's. robbers of ancient Egyptian tombs in the Fayyum region, east of the Nile, found absolutely stunning portraits. Already in 1887 the Viennese antiquarian Theodor Ritter von Count acquired a large number of portraits and organized a series of exhibitions - in Berlin, Munich, Paris, Brussels, London and New York. Very soon on these portraits of the controversy flared up. The scientists did not agree with each other in the matter of dating, some even cried about rigging. Finally, the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie found that they were created in the era of the Roman conquest of Egypt, ie in the first century of our era.
To date, was discovered around 1000 Fayum portraits. Their excellent condition is dry klimetom regions, where they were found - in the Fayyum, as already mentioned, but also in Memphis, at Thebes, in Antinopolise.

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It's portraits, executed in the technique of encaustic (pigment mixed with beeswax, which is applied warm, if it is used in pure form, in the cold, if it was a pre-made wax emulsion). By the time they are synchronous writing of the Gospels, but looks incredibly modern. Why are the characters depicted in them have such a reality? This is - the mystery of Fayum mummy portraits.
Most of them are written on the tree, often - linden, but sometimes they are the basis sludit linen (shrouds). Artists, authors of these portraits have used gold and four pigment - black, red and ocher are two types of these artists were Greco-Egyptian origin (Greeks settled in Egypt since the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, for four years before the creation of portraits of Fayyum). Levkas on the boards was dark, the artists worked, it gradually brightened. The surface of the portraits is not smooth, it can be clearly seen in the smears, brush or palette knife.

Surprising realism with which fulfill these images - no coincidence these artists called «zographoï» - «depicting eizn". Impression of the characters depicted are intensified by the sight of their wide-open eyes aimed straight at us.

These portraits depict the deceased and were intended for sarcophagi: thin lime boards used as a basis, were attached to the mummy with linen strips.
Diodorus Siculus described the manners of the Graeco-Roman Egypt as follows: "The people of this country feel the time spent on Earth, quite small, but give great importance to the time during which the virtue and dignity of the deceased will be remembered by their survivors; houses they call the inn, so how we spend them in a short period of time, and the tombs they call eternal dwellings, as the dead are in Hades infinite existence.

We must be aware that the Egyptian beliefs were held in the history of this country a great evolution, and that the names of Osiris and Isis cults hiding completely different content depending on age. Furthermore, in our particular time, they experienced the Jewish and Christian influence. Finally, we note that the Egyptian religion, formally politeistskaya, increasingly tended toward monotheism (Akhenaton tried to formalize this trend).

Therefore, it is - the authentic image of representatives of the urban middle class - soldiers, athletes, priests, merchants. Sometimes their names have reached us: Alena, Fl, Claudine ... Can assume that at least some of these portraits painted from nature. Function they have been twofold: first, they served the equivalent of modern photography, but for the world of the dead, gathered in the company of a jackal-god Anubis in his last trip to the country of Osiris, and secondly, within a short period (for embalming the body needed some 70 days) they were placed on the walls of the house of the deceased, that they remind family and friends of his features.
From the stylistic point of view, these portraits of hybrid. Greeks who performed them, using naturalistic techniques, but they represent the sacred elements of a purely Egyptian funeral ritual. In traditional Egyptian painting of a man never depicted in frontal view, as such a posture requires the opposite - like a man from the back, all the image rights in Egyptian art are given in the profile, and the Fayum portraits of the whole image are given in full face or three quarters, and poses they vary very little - like the photographs made in fotoavtomate. There are big differences in quality - some were made remarkable artists and others - clumsy provincial artisans. Choosing the artists was minimal: a mandatory form of very strict and not deviated. But perhaps precisely because of this from the best of these portraits comes phenomenal picturesque energy.