Excerpt from The Hawara Portfolio: Paintings of the Roman Age IT may seem strange that we are indebted to Egypt for our knowledge of classical portrait painting. The frescoes of Italy show nothing of the portable pictures which were so highly valued. It is only by a curious adaptation of Egyptian customs that we have preserved to us a branch of the most important division of ancient painting. In looking at these portraits, we must remember that they are only the work of a remote provincial town, surrounded by desert, and ...
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Excerpt from The Hawara Portfolio: Paintings of the Roman Age IT may seem strange that we are indebted to Egypt for our knowledge of classical portrait painting. The frescoes of Italy show nothing of the portable pictures which were so highly valued. It is only by a curious adaptation of Egyptian customs that we have preserved to us a branch of the most important division of ancient painting. In looking at these portraits, we must remember that they are only the work of a remote provincial town, surrounded by desert, and belong to the latest age of great art, some four or five centuries after it had reached its zenith. We can dimly see in them what the great paintings may have been, as in portraits painted to-day in Nigeria or Mauritius we might find traces of the methods of Titian or Botticelli. We can only be thankful that we have anything at all. The portraits were usually painted on thin wooden panels, about 13 inches wide and 15 high. Two here are painted on canvas, and that was the original system. They were framed in Oxford frames, and glazed, to be hung up in the house. On the death of the person, the portrait was taken down, when the body was sent to be embalmed, and the sides of the panel were split off it to reduce it to the suitable size to affix to the mummy. It was then fastened down by the outer bandages of the mummy wrappings, over the face. The mummy, with portrait, then stood for a generation or two in the court or hall of the mansion. After it had become damaged and dirty it was then sent off without any ceremony, often in a cartload of ancestors, and buried in the cemetery. There it lay under a few feet of dry sand until brought to light again in these excavations, after seventeen hundred years. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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