Gazing across two thousand years
If it should ever be my bizarre destiny to return in another life as a woman, then I should like to be called Euphrosyne Doxi- adis. This is the enchantingly mellifluous name borne by the Greek author of one of last year's most memorable books. As is the way with memorable books, The Mysterious Fayum Portraits (Thames & Hudson, £45) appeared too late for reviewers to slip into their Christmas lists, and was not, so far as I can recall, given any sort of critical acknowledgment, except in these pages. Since it is first and foremost a book about painting, the art critics of the various papers were presumably allowed, as is usual, to appropriate it from the literary editor's shelves. Sic transit Euphrosyne Doxiadis and her mysteries.
The portraits in question are those you have seen gazing somewhat sombrely from the covers of a thousand paperback transla- tions of classical authors. Hailing from the region of upper Egypt south of Cairo known as the Fayum, they were added to the casing around the mummified remains of Greeks and Hellenised Egyptians buried there during the first three centuries of the Roman Empire.
Once the paintings had been put in place (there is evidence that the undertakers occasionally 'adjusted' the corpse so that the head should fit more snugly under its portrait) the mummy was not taken at once to the burial ground. Instead it was stacked alongside others in the family house, where, as long as someone endured to remember its embalmed contents as a liv- ing person, an annual feast was honoured with its presence at the dining table. This role as a piece of furniture explains the wear and tear found on the portraits by the archaeologist Finders Petrie who in 1888 made the first extensive Fayum dig.
What is specifically mysterious about these images? Ostensibly, Euphrosyne Doxiadis's book is just a gathering of the best of them in a series of colour plates with a dense accompanying documentation — another, we might say, of those gor- geously tricked-out monographs with which art historians justify their tenure of profes- sional chairs, museum curatorships or cosy advisory posts with various auction houses. For anybody whose imagination is haunt- ed by the sheer fragmentariness of the ancient world and who longs for a closer walk with its dramatis personae, opening The Mysterious Fayum Portraits sends a shiver down the spine. Of course we thought we knew what these people looked like. All those furry grey reproductions from a bas-relief or a cameo or a vase painting adorning school editions of Virgil and Euripides were there to tell us, all those dusty corridors of Roman portrait busts and innumerable heads of Antinous and Alexander and vitrines full of coins like trays of ineptly-made sweets.
We didn't look like that at all, say the Fayum portraits. Our hair shone, our lips were moist, our eyes were bright with expectation, sadness or awakening desire, we worried about our jewellery and our clothes and we resembled you in this, as in our bodies' essential decay. We spoke Greek and demotic Egyptian mostly, Latin when we needed to, and left millions of our words behind for you to pore over in the impacted bundles of papyrus documents scraped out of sand-buried rubbish heaps along the Nile. The artists who painted these faces prided themselves on using a palette of only four basic colours: white, yellow ochre, red and black, mixed with molten beeswax on surfaces of wood or linen. Their names are unknown to us, and since most of them were probably illiterate, hawking their talents from one bereaved household to another, anything in the way of an individual artistic personality has long since Applicants for the position of moll should be blonde, with little education, but proficient at gum-chewing . . disappeared.
Yet the most compelling aspect of the Fayum paintings is precisely their sense of a distinctive identity, not just in the faces themselves but in the varying styles with which each artist resurrected the dead. Almost all the images are simply a head and shoulders, with a trinket or two to indicate status, against a plain grey back- ground. From panel after panel, as the faces gaze towards us, with their inky, liquid eyes exaggeratedly huge, the effect is that of an extraordinary closeness across the millennial gulf. We can taste the salt on their skin, feel the heat of their breath, smell their mixture of sweat and perfumed unguents, hear the jingle of their earrings and the gold fillets binding their glistening curls. The old cliché about speaking like- nesses was never truer than in these almost vocal icons, the grave Antonine matrons, the bullnecked athletes, the snub-nosed little girls and their stubble-chinned fathers, each subtly questioning glance trained on us with an ineluctable fixity of purpose.
If the Fayum faces are mysterious, then their mystery is not simply in what words they were poised to speak, but in two other riddles, neither of which Euphrosyne Doxi- adis necessarily answers. One is the matter of when exactly each was painted. Did these Greeks, fully attuned to immemorial Egyptian rituals of death, sit for their por- traits while still alive; were they painted from memory, with the family giving hints to the artists; or did the painters sit, brush in hand, beside the body as the embalmers did their grisly work?
The other is the greatest mystery of all. How was it that an art at its best as subtle as anything by the great portraitists of Renaissance Venice or Impressionist France was allowed to perish so utterly that humanity had to wait 1,000 years before mastering its techniques once more? Look- ing at these Fayum faces, Hermione Gra- matike, the chignoned schoolmarm, the two curly-mopped brothers of Antinopolis, Isidora with her patrician dewlap, and the hawk-nosed, seen-it-all, done-it-all grand- mother from Aldunim, we feel they must know the answer, but there are certain things they want us to tell them first, before they consent to open those saturnine lips.
Jonathan Keates
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