By Nigel Ryan It is all too easy to think of the portrait as a proto-modern genre; the degree of realism necessary to escape the iconic imperative or hieratic stricture is seen, erroneously, as a post-Renaissance prerogative, dependent upon a particular understanding of laws of perspective, on optical and colour theories, on an ability to manipulate the descriptive psychology of chiaroscuro -- on, in short, the whole panoply of a post-Renaissance painterly vocabulary. Yet the Fayoum portraits, the most impressive group of paintings to have survived from the ancient world, startle because they do exactly what they should not; they are, after all, 2000-years-old and the past is another country. Why, then, should it be occupied by people who look like us? For make no mistake, these are real people, and disturbingly so because they remain, across the millennia, recognisable. And it is the moment of recognition that provides the first shock. The idiom is just too modern for such ancient objects, too impressionistic, too fleeting to have survived. These faces frown, foreheads wrinkle, eyes fix the spectator with consistently mournful gaze. The paint, mostly though by no means always encaustic on wood, retains its fluidity, shows the marks of the artist, the brush strokes and manipulation of pigment by finger or hard tool. Both subject and artist remain present, the former literally so because these portraits are simulacra of what lies beneath. The second shock comes with the realisation that what lies beneath is the real head. Rome retained the inveterate fondness for the portrait, and the gilt glass portraits in the cemeteries kept to her tradition of photographic likeness. Soon, however, the awareness of eternal life was to impart a new accent to the individual face, as the proximity of the corpse was to do in the Fayoum: André Malraux, The Voices of Silence. The skull is beneath the skin. These portraits are possessed by death. It is a banal melodrama though one whose truth we are forced to acknowledge, not least because of the inclusion in this exhibition of two portraits in situ, i.e. still attached to their elaborately bandaged mummies. But while the inclusion of Ptolemaic and Roman gilded stucco cartonnage busts is an attempt to place the surrounding portraits within the context of a continuing Egyptian mortuary practice, it is less an awareness of eternal life that these portraits articulate than the inexorable passing of our time on this earth. And that they do this is a function of their quality as portraiture, not of their status of memorial objects, not as icons of stasis, but as depictions of people. The very best of these portraits seem, if anything, overly possessed of enargeia, the animation that was perceived to be the apex of Greek naturalism and the presence of which lends such pathos. But it is a frozen animation, caught as the hot wax solidified after being pushed around by the artist. Despite the skills of the embalmers, honed over centuries, despite the hundreds of metres of the highest quality linen bandages, the stucco cases and the gold leaf, it is the simulacra, the impressions created, that have survived, and not the mortal remains. Malraux's suggestion, that "behind the Fayoum figures, whoever the artisans that made them, lay an immense ambition, that oldest land of death, which clasped in its embrace the living and mummies, was once more bidding these forms of death to confer on mortals their eternity" appears curiously wide of the mark. It is indicative, though, of the bastardised pedigree of the portraits, something that has led to a great deal of unseemly haggling, including the redundant attempt to assert, in the exhibition catalogue -- to what purpose, and using what criteria is never stated -- a nationality for the portraits. The catalogue essay is a crude attempt to address a problem that has dogged these paintings: just how are they located? Since having first come to light in any quantity -- the Italian adventurer Pietro della Valle acquired two in the mid-17th century but it was not until the late 19th century that they began to be excavated in any quantity, a great many passing through the hands of the Viennese art dealer Theodor Graf -- they have eluded classification. Graf did not help matters by attempting to pass them off as portraits of the Ptolemies, but the problem was more deeply engrained than the occasional dodgy provenance -- after all, the first of Flinders Petrie's well-documented excavations followed within two years of the European debut of Graf's finds. Realistic portraits in the Greek style on Egyptian mummies in a Roman province: where do they go? Mummies -- hieratic, "other"-worldly, strange, dangerous, with their alien masks, witnesses to the redundant grandeur of a lost civilisation, could safely be located in the burgeoning Egyptology collections of Europe's museums. Recognisable faces, though, the faces of people, were precisely the kind of faces not to fit. There is something dangerous about giving the past a human face, a face that might reflect your own, particularly when the past is on the other side of the Mediterranean. In Europe's museums the resistance to the portraits was such that they were dispersed between Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Coptic departments of antiquities, marginalised as unclassifiable curiosities rather than as the most coherent body of painting to have survived from ancient times. It is only recently that the portraits have come to be reexamined and reassessed. The Cairo show comes after a larger exhibition toured several European museums, attracting generally euphoric reviews, and follows the publication of Euphrosyne Doxiadis's The Mysterious Fayoum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt, the first monograph to have appeared on the portraits in more than half a century. Egypt is fortunate that its holdings encompass some of the finest portraits, containing examples in all known media -- tempera on linen, encaustic on wood and Punic wax. They also include the only dated portrait, the spectacular Tondo of Two Brothers, a rare double portrait which dominates the far wall of the current show. If the portraits subverted the taxonomy of the great imperial collections, giving an all too human face not just to an ancient population, but to a colonised one, they have been destined, too, to generate other confusions. Were they painted from life, or after the subject had died? Who were the artists? What techniques were used? Given their enigmatic status for much of the present century, few paintings have been subjected to any rigorous scientific analysis. Yet a few obvious conclusions can be drawn. During his excavations Petrie unearthed framed encaustic portraits, providing evidence that there was a local tradition of hanging domestic portraits. And analyses of mummies, together with documentary evidence, show that youthful faces are often attached to far from youthful bodies which, given the obvious disdain the paintings show for idealisation, suggests that an already existing portrait was cut down specifically to be bound with the mummy. Certainly, stylistically, a number of portraits in the current exhibition indicate that they can only have been painted from life. The dramatic turn of the head, emphasised by the painting of the neck of the bearded man (catalogue number 33252), implies that the image was commissioned as a domestic rather than funeral portrait. And despite the presence of the two statuettes in the Tondo, identified as Osirantinous and Hermanubis, both deities associated with death, it takes an enormous leap of the imagination to believe that such portraits could have been produced posthumously. Far more likely is that the two deities, whose identity is, in any case, by no means conclusive, were added later. As far as technique is concerned, it is relatively easy to reconstruct, from the portraits themselves, the methods by which they were produced. Encaustic, from the Greek enkaio, to burn in, involves mixing pigments with hot wax and applying them over a painted ground. This requires that the painting be executed at speed. The molten wax allows for heavy impasto once it has solidified, a feature most apparent in the portrait of an athlete included in the current exhibition. Because the molten medium cools so rapidly, colours are overlapped, and outlines softened, by using a hard tool, particularly in the areas denoting flesh, which leaves distinct marks in the surface. In one of his epistles Seneca provides a convenient description of the encaustic technique: "The painter chooses with great speed between his colours which he has placed in front of him in great quantity and variety of hues, in order to portray faithfully the naturalness of a scene, and he goes backwards and forwards with his eyes and with the hands between waxes and the picture." In the hands of the most talented of the Fayoum portrait artists the encaustic technique results in portraits structured by a sophisticated colourism that, if it resembles anything, resembles the work of the Venetian school. Structure becomes dependent on the handling of hues, with planes advancing or receding according to their tonal values. Wax used cold presents an intermediate medium between encaustic and tempera. Because emulsified wax cools much more slowly than its molten counterpart, the artist has greater control over its consistency. Indeed, the results can look very similar to tempera. There is less obvious abandon in the painting, it looks less bravura than its molten counterpart, but it does allow for a more studied construction of surface detail. The image listed as A Portrait of a Bald Man, painted on a pronouncedly curved wooden ground which emphasises the broadness of the domed brow, is almost certainly completed in cold wax. The current show contains only one image completed on linen, in tempera, though a second tempera painting, of Dionysius, serves to illustrate the manner in which surface can be articulated by detailed cross-hatching. (Tempera, too, accounts for the surprisingly modern appearance of so many Fayoum portraits as the artists break the face of their subjects into components which were only to be reassembled in a like manner in the earliest days of modernism.) The portrait of the bald man is doubly interesting in that it conforms to the tetrachromatic palette extolled in ancient treatises on painting. Colours are restricted to the four Greek primaries -- white, yellow ochre, red earth and black -- though the latter, depending on the material used as pigment, and on its tonal value in juxtaposition, can appear blue. Many of the Fayoum portraits supplement the four colour palette with rose madder, and shades of purple and green, most commonly in the clothes. And in the stunning portrait of a lady which hangs immediately to the right of the exhibition upon entering, the purples of the extraordinarily freely painted clothing appear to be accented in porphyry, an extremely costly pigment, though in other paintings cheaper, pinker madder has been used. It is not, though, in the exposure of such technical details that the strengths of the current exhibition lie, but on the overwhelming effect that these portraits produce on the spectator. They have been served well in the hanging of the exhibition, perhaps the most impressively curated show Cairo has seen for a decade. The gallery is dark, sepulchral, the images themselves individually lit. Overcrowding has been avoided, and portraits are hung in small groups according to provenance. As an opening shot for the Horizon One Gallery, part of the Mahmoud Khalil Museum complex, it is an impressive debut. Visit this exhibition, and then think of mummies, and it is not Boris Karloff, nor even the royal corpses of the Egyptian Museum, that will come to mind. The real curse of the mummy is that it is no different than you or me: "it" shared the same worries, the same smile, the same preoccupations. The past turns out not to be a different country after all, though one might seek to resist the implications of such vast expanses of time being populated by so many memento mori. This exhibition comprises a good cross section of some of the most remarkable portraits ever painted. It is an event, yet on three separate visits I had the gallery virtually to myself. (For full details of the exhibition, see Listings)
