 |
AN314270001
© The Trustees of the British Museum |
Last Monday I had the special opportunity to view an ancient mummy portrait up close (like the one above from the British Museum) at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles with conservator, Marie Svobada, a curator, chemist and artist, Sylvana Barrett who specializes in ancient techniques. (This is the portrait.) http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=7654
These mummy portraits were found in ancient Egypt attached to coffins and were painted during the Roman empire. There are over a thousand scattered in museums throughout the world. Some are painted by highly skilled artists and some of the paintings are much more naive in style. They are painted on very thin wood panels with beeswax. Marie Svoboda is doing a study on the portraits trying to determine how they were painted and whether something was mixed with the wax. Most of the paintings are very textural and have a lot of dimension.
I always get excited when I can get up close or touch an artifact from the past that is thousands of years old! I was also able to view the paintings in an interesting program called RTI, http://culturalheritageimaging.org/Technologies/RTI/. This program allows you to see every brush stroke of a painting and how it was executed in a way that you could never see with the naked eye...especially under the dark lighting conditions of a museum.
Part of my research at the Getty is for my upcoming book on the ancient techniques that I've been teaching. Next month I'll be in NYC at the MET researching frescoes, encaustics and mosaics.
