Fayoum at the Ashmolean

Fayoum at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Fayoum portraits are the most astonishing body of painting to have to come to us from the ancient world, remarkable for their social importance and for their quality as art. They are a type of naturalistic painted portrait on wooden boards attached to upper class mummies from Roman Egypt. They belong to the tradition of panel painting, one of the most highly regarded forms of art in the classical world. Fayoun are the only large body of art from that tradition to have survived.

Surviving examples indicate that they were mounted into the bands of cloth that were used to wrap the bodies. They usually depict a single person, showing the head, or head and upper chest, viewed frontally. In terms of artistic tradition, the images derive more from Greco-Roman artistic traditions than Egyptian ones. Some aspects of the mummy portraits, especially their frontal perspective and their concentration on key facial features, strongly resemble later icon painting. Two groups of portraits can be distinguished by technique: one of encaustic (wax) paintings, and the other in tempera. The former are usually of higher quality.

Most of the mummy portraits that have survived have unfortunately become detached from their mummies. There are two examples at the Ashmolean however, where the portraits are still attached to the bodies:

looking closer (apologies for the poor quality of the photographs, but they are behind glass and it's really difficult to get a clear picture)

looking closer

There is a rare fayoum at the Ashmolean, something I have not seen before:

It's a double-sided panel from a tomb in Roman Egypt. The same woman appears in two portraits. On one side she wears a modest brown tunic with a red band, a gold crescent necklace and hooped earrings threaded with pearls. Her hair is close cropped.

On this side she has acquired a mantle and an elaborate hairpiece with corkscrew curls.