Download Anonymous, Portrait of a Young Woman, beginning of 2nd c. CE

Anonymous, Portrait of a Young Woman, beginning of 2nd c. CE,
encaustic on panel, 34.3 x 17.8 cm, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
This naturalistic portrait of a young woman, whose head is slightly turned to reveal an arresting
gaze, is one of around nine hundred Fayum funeral portraits that were created in Egypt beginning
in the late first century BCE, after the Roman annexation of Egypt, until the third and fourth
centuries CE, when the Roman Empire underwent irrevocable cultural changes and an economic
crisis. After the annexation, Egyptian aristocracy intermarried with Romans and Greeks who had
settled in Egypt. This is evidenced by the Greek and Roman names on some Egyptian-style
gilded mummy cases. Found in the Fayum Basin, Fayum portraits exemplify the new practice of
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replacing the masks of mummies with realistic Greco-Roman portraits. The encaustic technique
used to produce this work involves painting with hot coloured waxes. The direction of the
strokes follows the form of the facial traits. The paint on the nose, cheeks, chin and the contours
of the eyes was applied with a thicker layer, while the contours of the face and hair were drafted
over the liquid paints. Paintings done this way with such a durable material as wax retain a
surprisingly rare freshness of colour. English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie has proposed that
Fayum portraits were painted while their subjects were alive, and were hung on the wall in their
houses before assuming a funereal function after their deaths. The mummy portraits from the
Fayum Oasis represent exceptional examples of surviving Greco-Roman portraiture.
Alena Krasnikova
Family Works: A Multiplicity of Meanings and Contexts | http://www.concordia.ca/familyworks