ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 1996.
Jezik: Engleski
Oblast: Istorija umetnosti
Autor: Strani

The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt / Euphrosyne Doxiadis

Foreword by Dorothy J. Thompson


London 1996. Tvrd povez, zaštitni omot, engleski jezik, bogato ilustrovano, veliki format (25×33 cm), 245 strana.
Knjiga je odlično očuvana.




` Remarkable images.. Paints a vivid picture of the people of Roman Egypt` — History Today

`The best text available on late Classical portraiture and the origin of the icon` — The Spectator

`An engaging text. A wonderful array of colour photographs` — The Times

`The finest book on ancient art that has come this reviewer`s way since the 1970s` — Susan Walker, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum




In the pages of this book we can step back nearly two thousand years and look into the eyes of the men and women who lived in Roman Egypt during the Imperial age. The Fayum district (from which the portraits take their name) had a mixed population of Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Syrians, Libyans, Nubians and Jews. In the old Egyptian tradition, they and their contemporaries in similar settlements in the Nile valley embalmed the bodies of their dead; but they then placed over the mummy a painted portrait. The portraits were to preserve the memory of each individual, which they do to an uncanny degree — whether with perfect realism or in vivid stylization.

The Fayum portraits are by far the largest body of ancient easel-painting to have survived. Over 1000 have so far been discovered — men, women and children, young and old, plain and beautiful. A few of these faces have become familiar, but as a whole they have been neglected by art-historians and are unknown to the general public.

Euphrosyne Doxiadis`s book combines up-to-date scholarship with illustrations of almost 200 of these arresting portraits, selected from around the world, and grouped according to the places where they were found, allowing us to recreate communities and relationships. Many new photographs were commissioned; some portraits have never been reproduced in colour before, and some are now shown since cleaning.

An explanatory text, itself illustrated, sets the people and the paintings in their fascinating social, artistic and geographical context. Euphrosyne Doxiadis brings a special qualification in her own training as an artist: she describes the techniques used (with which she herself has experimented) and shares with us a keen painterly perception of the works. She is also uniquely placed to show how the Fayum portraits relate to Byzantine icon-painting, in a tradition that extends from ancient Greece to the Renaissance and on to the present day.