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wildbrush's art.to.day - you entered my world of technical art info - |
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Scale and dimensions • The materials Supports: - Wood - Linen Preparation of the surface - Linen |
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Scale and dimensions: |
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| The
majority of the mummy portraits known today appear to the viewer to be
life-size, whereas they are considerably smaller [see, e.g., 8, 87]. The
illusion is probably due to the fact that when a portrait painter works
from life, he perceives his subject from a certain distance, leading to
a reduction in the size of the sitter's face in the finished
painting. To the viewer, conversely, the distance from which he or she is looking at the painting gives the illusion that the person it portrays is shown life-size. The more convincing the rendering of the face, the greater this impression. Most of the portraits harmonize in size with the mummy to which they were attached. In exceptional cases, however, the subject's head is disproportionate: the head of the 'Golden Girl' [60], for instance, is far too large for the body, while, conversely, another mummy from Hawara has a very small head [62] in relation to the elongated body. The panel of the child of Demos [39] is roughly the same size as that of the mother [40], whereas both the portrait and the actual dimensions of the mummy 2) indicate that it was an infant. The average size of the portraits is a vertical format about 35 x 18 centimetres. In many cases the panel was initially wider, and had been cut down for insertion into the bandaging of the mummy's head (a fact first noticed by Petrie). |
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The materials: Supports: - Wood |
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| The
panels used for the portraits are of different types of wood, cut to
different sizes and different thicknesses. In most instances the grain
runs vertically, but in a few exceptional cases it runs horizontally
[e.g. 4]. These are usually the most impaired portraits, for they
disintegrate horizontally into features of which only the eyes can be
telling and those are rarely preserved [e.g. 106, 107]. The thickness of the panels is usually a mere 1.6-2 millimetres. Such thinness has been explained as necessary for the ancient technique of encaustic; it has even been suggested that the panels must have been heated before or while the wax-based colours were being applied or worked in. My own experiments with the encaustic technique (see below) have proved these assumptions to be wrong. There are, however, other reasons that might account for the panels being so wafer-thin. The thinner the panel, the better it would be able to curve slightly in accord with the shape of the upper part of the body. The wood of the sycamore fig is particularly flexible - especially if boiled in water before use - and does not break even when forced to acquire a rounded shape. X-rays made of certain mummies show that the skulls had been roughly pushed down by the embalmers to bring them to the same level as that of the mummy wrappings and create a flat area for the portrait to be inserted. Such posthumous brutal handling was apparently quite routine. In those conditions, a thicker panel would have been even more awkward to insert, and would only have added undesirable height to the surface and weight to the mummy. A final advantage of thinness would be that wood in Egypt was scarce and expensive. Certain thin panels on which portraits were painted seem to have been pre-curved, so as not to warp further once the portrait had been inserted into the cartonnage. Also, they were thin enough to be easily held in place by the stronger stucco covering. The portrait of the younger Artemidorus [57] provides an example, the outer hard plaster covering (stucco) of the mummy following the curves of the unevenly warped panel. One can see that both stucco and panel have remained in place without movement since the mummy was made. In the portrait of a bald man found at Abusir el-Meiek [95] the curve of the warping coincides with the curvature of the head: the painter must have selected the wooden panel most carefully, so that it would emphasize the three-dimensionality of the head. There are a few rare exceptions to the rule of veneer-thin panels, for example several portraits from Antinoopolis [37]. Petrie at Hawara found thicknesses between 1/16 and 1/4 inches (1.6 - 6.3 millimetres). 3) The types of wood used for the portraits have not yet been scientifically analysed for the greater part of the corpus. The few that have been so examined indicate that sycamore fig was widely used. 4) This is hardly surprising, since sycamore trees abounded in Egypt and especially in the Fayum area. Other kinds of wood were used as well, among them cypress, cedar, pine, fir and lime. Ebers, writing of the Graf portraits found near Er-Rubayat, noted that the panels varied in thickness, the heavier ones being mainly sycamore while the thinner ones were cypress. 5) The panels Petrie found were usually of cedar and sometimes of pine. |
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| -
Linen |
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| Portraits
were also painted
on linen shrouds
and on larger shrouds that we might venture to call funeral hangings.
For the shrouds of the type found mainly at Hawara, the portraits on
linen cloth looked out from the frame-like bandages of the mummy, much
like those painted on wooden panels [cp.32,
33 with 46]. Another group of shrouds has the portrait painted on the outermost wrapping of the mummy, which envelops it like the paper wrapped around a parcel. There are a number of examples from Antinoopolis (93, 34, 35], including the 'Lady with the Ankh-Cross' [94], and Ammon [93]; others were found at Saqqara [9, 12]. The very large shrouds or hangings from Saqqara that need to be seen fully stretched out were painted in tempera on linen [13, 14]; in most cases the portrait head was glued onto the decorated cloth. |
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| Preparation
of the surface: |
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| In
the case of wood, as we have seen, preparation varied according
to the medium. Encaustic does not adhere to plaster, so a gypsum ground
was never used with that medium. Instead, there were several
possibilities: the wood might be left bare (very occasionally); or one
of several preparations might be applied: distemper (the most common),
transparent glue size (which may, with the passage of time, leave no
visible traces and look like bare wood), or dark wax (found only
exceptionally, e.g. in the panel of Didyme, in the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge). For painting in tempera, the usual preparation was to cover
the panel with a mixture of animal glue and gypsum in one or more
layers. The more superimposed layers, the more it resembled the
sophisticated Renaissance gesso and, indeed, the preparation of
Byzantine icons. |
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Linen Linen was prepared with distemper, in order to stiffen it as a support for the paint. Sometimes this was done with a thin layer of plaster, as seems to be the case for Hermione and the man found with her [32, 33]. The spectacular portrait known as 'Aline' [51], one of the most interesting of the entire corpus, was painted in tempera, with stucco additions (for the necklace and the gold ornaments on her earrings), on a linen surface prepared with a dark distemper - fairly unusual for a work in tempera. < back to page 1 page 3 > |
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