Mummy Portrait Collections: A Brief History 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. What provenance alone cannot provide, conservation and material analyses can help reconstruct and retrace. 7 The APPEAR database allows for the opportunity to reconsider provenance and conservation as essential partners. The distinctions between provenance and provenience are often blurred, and they remain a particular challenge with mummy portrait records, where art-historical attributions to a site based on style or materials have often been conflated with a secure findspot or provenience. 5 Although some portraits undoubtedly were victims of pests, poor burial conditions, or ancient vandalism, other portraits were deliberately extracted from discarded mummies, perceived more salable as artworks without the physical reminder of their origin. Mummies bereft of portraits-such as that of a teenager now in the collection at Durham University-are a reminder of the complicated history behind the collection of mummy portraits and of what has been lost. 4 But even portraits excavated together may have divergent collecting histories, in which they were displayed, mounted, or sold in different ways, leaving unanswered conservation and provenance questions alike. An unexcavated portrait cannot be fully recontextualized by comparison with excavated material it must remain, to borrow a concept from the archaeologist Elizabeth Marlowe, on shaky ground. to make clear that an object comes from a known, documented context. This distinction is often delineated by the use of the term provenience Citation: Provenience.
![fayum mummy portraits fayum mummy portraits](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/39/ee/30/39ee30d97137bfe6529463fc49760691.jpg)
![fayum mummy portraits fayum mummy portraits](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/ca/aa/c5/caaac530359b080bcb19fc681f4e9431.jpg)
To many archaeologists, the superseding issue is not an object’s ownership history but an excavation history or at least a secure findspot. A mummy portrait’s provenance situated within this broader framework is more like a tree than a straight line, comprising centuries of data points that converge into a single object that then may be transferred, bought, stolen, sold, or even divided into separate fragments. All of these elements are brought together by the APPEAR project, where provenance and conservation data sets can be considered concomitantly. 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., the source for the wax. A colorant either derived from natural sources-mineral, plant, or insect-or produced synthetically. 3 For mummy portraits, perhaps provenance should then be considered not merely in terms of an artwork’s pedigree but in terms of the age of the wood used for its panel, the species of tree from which it was hewn, the traces of prior use, the origin of the pigments Citation: Pigment. To the scholar Rosemary Joyce, provenance can stretch back to the sources for an artwork’s material components as well as forward through the litany of the artwork’s owners. 2 But provenance has other meanings: instead of ownership history, it can document the place where an artwork was created or the time at which an artwork was first known. Traditional object provenances are also often implicit but not explicit-in other words, what is known about an object’s history is emphasized, but not what is absent. But the emphasis on these few constituents has often meant the elision of a great deal of history, and for many objects bought on the art market, including mummy portraits, provenances are rarely complete. 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.
![fayum mummy portraits fayum mummy portraits](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/ce/0c/a1/ce0ca1bda61366ec9ea790273d8a6281.jpg)
Provenance: A Time Line?įor museums, provenance often signifies a discussion of an artwork’s history of ownership. 1 This paper will focus on select case studies drawn from the corpus of the APPEAR project in order to examine them within the historical context of mummy portrait collections and to explore the role provenance can play in furthering the collaborative objectives of the project itself.
![fayum mummy portraits fayum mummy portraits](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_bVGWuFQ3QJ8/TTiMKu1-nAI/AAAAAAAAACs/CRFEdz9KVt4/s1600/R%25C3%25B6misch-%25C3%2584gyptischer_Meister_001.jpg)
In this regard, the APPEAR project-which seeks to “increase the understanding of materials and manufacture”-is perfectly situated to consider the role of provenance when undertaking a comprehensive study of these works of art. But no artwork is absent of history, from the time when it was made until its current circumstance. was not preeminent among its ambitious research aims. When the APPEAR (Ancient Panel Paintings: Examination, Analysis, and Research) project was launched in 2013, provenance Citation: Provenance.