Ancient Painting

If you look at the vast majority of ancient art that survives, you'd think that ancient civilizations didn't do much painting. You'd be wrong about that. Ancient painters produced many works in various mediums, but the majority of those works didn't survive the millennia. Sculpture made of stone is more likely to survive than a painting made on a piece of wood. Nonetheless, there are wonderful examples of ancient painting in museums and in situ. My favorites are Fayyum funeral portraits dating from Ptolemaic Egypt.

Unknown, "Eutyches," encaustic on panel

Egyptians of the Ptolemaic period mummified their dead in a manner similar to practices dating back thousands of years. The mummies of that time were often entombed with a painted likeness of the dead covering the bust and head. The portraits were painted either using tempera, the same sort of paint used to paint tomb walls, or encaustic. The paintings now extant mostly come from an Egyptian oasis in the desert southwest of Cairo. These portraits have been known since the 17th century although the majority were discovered in the 19th.

Encaustic is still used in painting, consisting of pigment added to wax in its simplest form but often with added resins, oils or other substances. Encaustic paintings have a luster and depth that wasn't achieveable with tempera. These paintings look to my eye as if they could have been done any time in the last century or two rather than two thousand years ago. They are lively and real, depicting definite individuals. The subjects were upper class, well-off, and Greek. (When Alexander the Great died, his General Ptolemy was ceded Egypt as a kingdom.)

These portraits clearly must represent a well-known painting tradition in the ancient world. They have survived because they were left in a very dry desert environment. Other wood panel paintings in more humid and cooler climates did not survive but clearly must have existed. Very few examples are still to be seen, but one of them, the Severan Tondo, dating from about 200CE, still exists. The origins and history of that work aren't known (it was discovered in the 19th century) but it is similar to these Egyptian funeral portraits, though it is a painting of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus and his family. Beyond that, other ancient paintings are almost all wall paintings (murals) and are present in many places, notably Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy.

The skills of the painters of these works vary widely, and the preservation varies too. Given that these portraits were only intended to be viewed for a brief time, it's not surprising that some are more realistic than others. These are a small selection of the Fayyum works.