Tempera on a gesso ground on poplar panel, 80 X 123 1/4.
This luxuriant and conspicuous display of wealth is deliberate. The feast on the table was a feast for the eyes/but also a warning - the Vanitas tradition of still life (Latin for Vanity).
In painting - the process of building up images in transparent oil layers.
Disadvantage is when moisture creeps in between the plaster and the paint, causing the paint to flakes off, as in the case of Michelangelo's Last Supper. restoration. "The Picture" began to appear in Italian art in the early fifteenth century. The Cultural arrival of painting as an art.
The fresco's have been preserved because of the extremely dry environment in the caves.
Fresco, 1305 CE in Scroven gni Family Chapel containing 38 individual scenes that tell the stories of the lives of the Virgin and Christ. The two crouching figures with their backs to us extend into our space in a manner similar to the bowl of eggs in the Roman fresco. Here, the result is to involve us in the sorrow of the scene. Lines dividing the various sections of the Giotto fresco are clearly apparent, especially in the sky, known as Giornate, meaning "a day's work."
The Glorification of Saint Ignatius 1691-94. Baroque ceiling design
Egyptian mummy portraits. A portrait shows what an individual would have looked like. Ancient Egyptians did not make much use of portraits; inscriptions containing the name and titles of an individual were used for identification purposes instead. Portraits were, however, important in Roman art.
The hair is brushed forward and cropped in the style of court portraits of the Trajanic period (98-117 C.E.). Pink has been used to highlight his nose and lips, and dark brown to indicate shading and the contours of the face. The portrait gives the impression of age, authority and austerity.
Egyptian mummy portraits were placed on the outside of the cartonnage coffin over the head of the individual or were carefully wrapped into the mummy bandages.
These techniques have helped prove that the portrait did indeed show the person as they appeared during life. Of course, there was still some element of artistic license; for example, the mummy of Artimedorus appeared to be much more heavily built than he seemed in his portrait.
In the 1990s the subjects of mummy portraits were identified as the elite populations of the small towns of Egypt; these individuals negotiated an improvement in their status with the ruling Roman authorities by claiming a Greek historical identity. Recent epigraphic research confirms that this group also enjoyed exceptional legal privileges, and field survey has thrown remarkable light on some of the settlements in which they lived.
The APPEAR project was established in 2013 with seven seed institutions; at the time of this publication the project has flourished, expanding to forty-seven collaborating museums from the United States and Europe. Partner institutions participate by examining, analyzing, and researching the history, materials, methods, and technology of the artworks within their collections and contributing the results to a database that is used as a platform for study, investigation, and comparison. This collective data broadens the customary focused studies into a larger corpus of information, facilitating the identification of trends, enabling comparisons, and shedding new light on artistic practice, materials, and techniques. Additionally, as an outcome of the project’s expansion, a community has developed in which participants are able to reach out to other institutions and colleagues, exchange information, gain inspiration, and, in several instances, provide guidance and support to those who may not have the same resources or expertise. This collegial outreach has been a very special result of the project’s cooperative nature and success.
The conference focused heavily on the topic of artists’ materials and the identification of wood, pigmentsCitation: Pigment. A colorant either derived from natural sources—mineral, plant, or insect—or produced synthetically. Typically, pigments are crushed into a fine powder and mixed with a binder, resulting in a suspension that becomes insoluble when dry; a dye produces a lake pigment when attached to an inorganic substrate or mordant., and binding media, as well as on the state-of-the-art, innovative, and nondestructive imaging methods now used to identify them. Papers by the British Museum draw on many years of specialist scientific expertise to summarize the range of wood species that were used for more than 180 panels and to chart the development of the leading procedure for multispectral imaging and its application to the study of mummy portraits. (See Ch. 2and Ch. 6) A focused examination of one well-provenanced collection of mummy portraits from the Roman cemeteries at Tebtunis, FayumCitation: Fayum (Faiyum, El Faiyûm, Al-Fayoum, Fayyum). A fertile desert basin immediately to the west of the Nile River, south of Cairo. Roman mummies were discovered there in several ancient cemeteries and archaeological sites, including Hawara and er-Rubayat. The Fayum was a very prosperous region and a vibrant cultural center during the Greco-Roman and Roman periods., now at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, considers the materials and techniques that characterize one workshop—an exciting and model study; the work was aided by scholars at Northwestern University and the British Museum. (See Ch. 14)
Technical imaging also plays a significant role in the characterization of materials, further guiding and corroborating scientific analysis nondestructively.
The development of the APPEAR database and website will give scholars across the world a hitherto unavailable, evidence-based view of the making of mummy portraits and related funerary artifacts. The anonymous painters of these rare colored images of the people of Roman Egypt are now beginning to come into a focus unreachable twenty-four years ago.
The shape of the upper portion of mummy portrait panels may indicate the cemetery in which the mummy was buried: stepped panels are associated with Antinoöpolis, round-topped panels with Hawara, and angled panels with er-Rubayat.
What provenance alone cannot provide, conservation and material analyses can help reconstruct and retrace. Through interrogating provenance and conservation data together, commonalities in treatment, materials, and composition can be revealed—or old assumptions about a portrait’s history disproven.
For museums, provenance often signifies a discussion of an artwork’s history of ownership. In this way provenance is a kind of ownership pedigree, and historically, it was a way of championing particular excavators or owners whose inclusion could confer status or authenticity.
While provenance may not have been the original goal of the APPEAR project, it allows for the opportunity to explore the multiple, complicated histories of these portraits in collections around the world. Just as understanding the taphonomic processes that artifacts have undergone in archaeological contexts is important for later interpretation of these objects, the physical processes that affect artworks after excavation are imperative to understand as well. Projects such as the APPEAR database underscore the need for dynamic collaborations on provenance as much as on material analyses.
The city was founded in AD 130 when the emperor Hadrian named it in honor of Antinoüs, his lover who drowned in the Nile.
Of the 278 individual portraits, paintings, and fragments currently entered into the APPEAR database, just over one hundred come from documented excavations. Two others are likely to have been owned if not excavated by Petrie but cannot be connected to specific records; five portraits had no provenance information available from the APPEAR project or from publications that would confirm their categorization. That leaves 166 portraits, or just under 60 percent of the portraits in the database without a secure documented provenience. Of them, four have been described as forgeries. This set of 166 unprovenienced portraits is split almost evenly between ex-Graf and non-Graf groups.
Citation: Fayum (Faiyum, El Faiyûm, Al-Fayoum, Fayyum). A fertile desert basin immediately to the west of the Nile River, south of Cairo. Roman mummies were discovered there in several ancient cemeteries and archaeological sites, including Hawara and er-Rubayat.
The Renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning— poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.
The state bed of Sobieski, King of Poland, was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with verses from the Koran. Its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully chased, and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions.
The King of Ceilan rode through his city with a large ruby in his hand, as the ceremony of his coronation. The gates of the palace of John the Priest were “made of sardius, with the horn of the horned snake inwrought, so that no man might bring poison within.”.
The favourites of James I wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold filigrane. Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston a suit of red-gold armour studded with jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap parseme with pearls.
Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison.
There was a gem in the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and “by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe” the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep and slain. According to the great alchemist, Pierre de Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him eloquent.
In Alphonso’s Clericalis Disciplina a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander, the Conqueror of Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan snakes “with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs.”.
Tempera on a gesso ground on poplar panel, 80 X 123 1/4.
This luxuriant and conspicuous display of wealth is deliberate. The feast on the table was a feast for the eyes/but also a warning - the Vanitas tradition of still life (Latin for Vanity).
In painting - the process of building up images in transparent oil layers.
Disadvantage is when moisture creeps in between the plaster and the paint, causing the paint to flakes off, as in the case of Michelangelo's Last Supper. restoration. "The Picture" began to appear in Italian art in the early fifteenth century. The Cultural arrival of painting as an art.
The fresco's have been preserved because of the extremely dry environment in the caves.
Fresco, 1305 CE in Scroven gni Family Chapel containing 38 individual scenes that tell the stories of the lives of the Virgin and Christ. The two crouching figures with their backs to us extend into our space in a manner similar to the bowl of eggs in the Roman fresco. Here, the result is to involve us in the sorrow of the scene. Lines dividing the various sections of the Giotto fresco are clearly apparent, especially in the sky, known as Giornate, meaning "a day's work."
The Glorification of Saint Ignatius 1691-94. Baroque ceiling design