Thread by @MichaelDPress

We love to share these striking painted portraits from Roman Egypt, but we usually don't pay attention to some really important things about them -- like how museums got hold of them (the Louvre doesn't either!)

A thread on the darker side of these Egyptian painted portraits.

https://twitter.com/MuseeLouvre/status/1266414350870482945

These are often called "Faiyum portraits", because many of them come from the area of the Faiyum oasis south of the Delta.
But they've been also found at other sites throughout Egypt.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Faiy…

So scholars often refer to them as "mummy portraits".
Why? Because most if not all of them originally came from mummies.
Left: British Museum
britishmuseum.org/collection/obj…
Right: Met
metmuseum.org/art/collection…

Maybe you haven't seen them attached to mummies before.
This is because most of them were cut off of the mummy wrappings when they were found in modern times.

Flinders Petrie, who found dozens of them on mummies at the site of Hawara in the Faiyum in 1888 and 1911, describes the process in his journal.

He suggests it was impossible to transport them whole, and the portraits could be reinserted by museums.
archive.griffith.ox.ac.uk/index.php/petr…

As we see above, museums did sometimes reinsert them.
But many others -- I think most of them -- *weren't* reunited with mummies.
(Both of these are from Petrie's Hawara excavations & now in the British Museum)
britishmuseum.org/collection/obj…
britishmuseum.org/collection/obj…

And the majority of these mummy portraits weren't found in excavation at all, but by looters.
Here are two examples from the Met, purchased from 2 different antiquities dealers in the early 20th century.
metmuseum.org/art/collection…
metmuseum.org/art/collection…

So: most mummy portraits in museums outside Egypt were probably illegally excavated and *also* probably illegally removed from the country.
(Egypt had antiquities laws restricting excavation and export of antiquities since 1835.)

Why was all this done?
For European and American audiences -- and prospective European and American buyers.

The Austrian dealer Theodor Graf acquired a large number of mummy portraits in the late 1880s (said to be from Er-Rubaiyat, but since they were looted who knows for sure)
to sell.
You could buy them at the World's Fair.

https://twitter.com/MichaelDPress/status/1025833158787391488

Specifically, they were shown and sold and bought in this form in order to meet European and American ideas of "art".
Look at the complete mummies. They don't fit comfortably as art. They are hybrids. They include *dead bodies*

https://twitter.com/MichaelDPress/status/1266425592150401025

But remove them from their mummies and suddenly we get lovely portraits. They make sense in European and Western ideas of what "art" should be.
(Already a commenter has compared one to an El Greco.)

https://twitter.com/MichaelDPress/status/1266429214942793730

The fact is that most mummies from this period did not have these portraits.
In his 1888 journal Petrie describes that "for poor mummies without painting or cases we heave them over by the dozen every day." They were just discarded.

And this is a professional archaeologist! (admittedly in the 19th century, when approaches were vastly different, but still).
You can imagine what the looters did!

Besides these mummy portraits, there were many other ways of decorating mummies and depicting their faces in Roman Egypt.
Petrie found a number of examples of gilded plaster masks for instance, as on this mummy wrapped in an elaborate shroud found at Hawara in 1911.

source: Petrie, Roman Portraits and Memphis (IV), 1911

.@photograph_tut has written about many of these other kinds of funerary art -- examples that we don't usually see or even think about.
Riggs notes that the gilded plaster mask above is now lost!
books.google.com/books?id=5pLX9…

Those *other* mummy wrappings and masks don't fit our artistic ideals.
They (like the complete mummies with painted portraits) are Greco-Roman and Egyptian "hybrids".

In our traditional Western view of "civilization", by this period Egypt had long passed the torch to Greece and then Rome. It was no longer important, except as a reflection of Roman domination.
The painted portraits fit that idea, the others don't.
simonandschuster.com/books/Our-Orie…

And so scholars like Petrie, when they wrote about the mummy portraits, suggested they weren't really Egyptians at all -- they were Greeks, or other foreigners.

https://twitter.com/MichaelDPress/status/1194110452323762176

. . . even though Petrie, in his 1888 journal (March 4-10), had suggested these were native Egyptians!

(Putting aside the essentializing of native vs foreigner in either case, the shift in interpretation is remarkable.)

To recap:
These portraits were acquired by raiding tombs (usually illegally),
cutting them off dead bodies,
and usually smuggling them out of the country

-- so that we in Europe and America could appreciate as art that we then insisted wasn't even by or for Egyptians.

I agree that these are remarkable portraits and worth our time -- but next time you look at them, remember their full story . . . and what it says about power dynamics past & present.

https://twitter.com/MichaelDPress/status/1266444614589919234

So what about the Louvre example?
The highlights page gives no details of acquisition, just a suggested origin of "Antinoé?" (Antinoopolis), modern El-Sheikh 'Ibada in central Egypt, well south of the Faiyum -- based only on formal similarities.
louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-noti…

The Louvre's full database & its Museum Lab project give a little more info: it was bought in 1951 from Roger Khawam, an antiquities dealer.
So, probably looted & smuggled (& ripped off a mummy) like most other examples.
cartelfr.louvre.fr/cartelfr/visit…
museumlab.fr/exhibition/06/…