Research Catalog

Title

The mysterious Fayum portraits : faces from ancient Egypt / by Euphrosyne Doxiadis ; foreword by Dorothy J. Thompson.

Author

Doxiadis, Euphrosyne.

Publication

New York : H. N. Abrams, 1995.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

246 pages : illustrations (some color); 33 cm

Summary

• In the first three centuries A.D., in a fertile district of Roman Egypt called the Fayum, a diverse community of Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Syrians, Libyans, Nubians, and Jews flourished. These people, and many of their contemporaries throughout the Nile Valley, embalmed the bodies of their dead and then placed over the faces portraits painted on wooden panels or linen. These paintings, today known as Fayum, or mummy, portraits, were created to preserve the memory of each individual.
• The Fayum portraits are by far the most important body of portraiture to have survived antiquity. Reproduced in this arresting book are some 180 of the finest of the more than 1,000 extant images - of men, women, and children, young and old, plain and beautiful - all of whom seem uncannily alive. A few of these faces have become familiar to scholars and museum-goers, but as a whole they have been neglected by art historians and will be new to most readers.

Subject

• Mummy portraits > Egypt
• Portraits, Roman > Egypt

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Foreword / Dorothy J. Thompson -- I. Graeco-Roman Egypt. The Social Context. The Religious Context -- II. The Portraits. The Pictorial Tradition, from Apelles to Icons. Methods: Scale, Materials and Colours -- III. The Find-Sites. Memphis and Saqqara. The Fayum or Arsinoite Nome, 'the Garden of Egypt'. The Necropolises of Philadelphia: Er-Rubayat and 'Kerke'. The Necropolis of Arsinoe: Aueris, or Hawara. The Necropolises of Antinoopolis. Other Sites -- Commentaries on the Portraits. Maps of the Fayum and the Nile valley. Problems in the Dating of the Mummy Portraits / Barbara Borg. Costume, Hairstyles and Jewelry.

ISBN

0810933314

LCCN

95009506

OCLC

• 32591071
• ocm32591071
• SCSB-14474013

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries