2023-08-05 09:00:00
Reserved for subscribers
New scientific studies have unlocked the secrets of the famous funerary portraits unearthed at the end of the 19th century in the Fayoum, in Middle Egypt.
By Francois-Guillaume Lorrain
Photo booth. Portrait of a woman dating from the 2nd century AD. “The European” owes its nickname to its complexion. This is a luxury model because the support is cedar. Published on 05/08/2023 at 09:00
France had discovered them at the end of the 1990s. An exhibition at the Louvre had shown its entire collection, i.e. 31 portraits said for convenience of the Fayoum, from the name of this region of Middle Egypt, site of their main exhumation at the end of of the 19th century. These painted panels had struck by their beauty, their realism, the strangeness also of these deceased two thousand years ago who seem to be watching us. Art historians were inflamed. Here we had the chemically pure example of a graft, a cultural crossbreeding, a hybridization between aesthetics and ritual. On the one hand, the realistic Roman portrait; on the other hand, the Egyptian funerary tradition of the panel painted on the mummy. When Rome met Egypt…
After Caesar subdued Cleopatra, the…
I subscribe
#Egyptians #Romanized #stroke #brush