Face to face with mummies
Stare 1,700 years into the past
Two piercing eyes, framed by some serious eyelashes, gaze out from a computer screen in Professor Robert Erdmann’s office. The eyes belong to a portrait that was attached to an Egyptian mummy in the second century AD, meant to grant the deceased access to the afterlife. ‘I always associated Egyptian art with grandiose, impersonal subjects’, Erdmann confesses. ‘But these mummy portraits are so eloquent.’ He points to the refined painting on his screen. ‘This lady looks straight back at you from 1,700 years in the past.
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The exhibition Face to Face. The People Behind Mummy Portraits opened at the Allard Pierson in Amsterdam on 6 October, bringing together 38 mummy portraits from collections around the world. To coincide with the exhibition, Robert Erdmann and curator Ben van den Bercken are heading a research project using advanced techniques to analyse and document 12 of these portraits down to the micrometre. What information will this yield about the portraits and about ancient Egypt? And how do they relate to the selfies we take in hopes of immortalising ourselves today?
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Biography of the portraits
The team designed this research to be guided by what the materials reveal. ‘We are trying to piece together a biography of the portraits’, Erdmann explains. ‘So, how were they made? Where did the pigments and other materials come from?’ Egypt was a major crossroads at the time, in an international trade network stretching from Spain to India.
‘We know that some pigments were found only in very specific places in those days’, Van den Bercken adds. ‘If we come across those pigments, we’ll learn more not only about these trade networks, but also about how much such portraits cost, which can then tell us something about the deceased and their positions in society.’
Zooming in
Erdmann and Van den Bercken hope their analysis will also reveal more about the makers. For example, was there some sort of school for mummy portraitists?
‘To identify individual painters, you have to look not at the work as a whole, but zoom in on the details’, Erdmann says.
‘If you learned to paint an earlobe a particular way, then that’s how you’ll paint earlobes forever after.’ The team hope that by zooming in on such details and assessing the digital images side by side, these kinds of correlations will emerge.
Forgers
An object’s biography does not end at its creation. ‘We’d also like to learn what happened to these objects down the centuries’, Erdmann says. For example, were any of them restored? Or touched up?
Are those piercing eyes on his screen genuinely just as they were recorded by a painter 1,700 years ago?
Or might a restorer have made the eyelashes just smidgen darker or the whites of her eyes fractionally whiter? Is the painting even authentic at all?
Erdmann: ‘As long as you’ve got a market for objects like this, you have to assume there will be forgers out there. This research is helping us to separate the authentic from the fake.’
It is also scientifically significant, because Erdmann will be sharing the team’s innovative research techniques with art scholars around the world. He is also putting considerable energy into applications to make the research available to the public at large. ‘My mission is not just to understand and preserve cultural heritage, but to make it accessible. To see a smile on the face of exhibition-goers as they tinker with these images themselves.’
High-tech research
To extract as much information as possible from the ancient mummy portraits, Erdmann and his team are studying the panels using three different methods.
1 | Photography
PhD researcher Alessandra Marrocchesi designed a robotic high-resolution camera to scan the portraits millimetre by millimetre. The result is thousands of ultra-high-resolution photographs in which each pixel corresponds to eight micrometres on the portrait – roughly the diameter of a red blood cell.
‘It’s a virtual microscope tracking the entire surface,’ is how Erdmann describes it. ‘This is letting us compare and contrast details with both the naked eye and AI, which we’re employing to look for micro-level patterns in things like pigment composition.’
Erdmann zooms in on the image of the young woman until the almost invisible fabric beneath the paint layer comes into crystalline focus, resolving into a regular jigsaw pattern of twisted fibres. ‘If you look here, you can see the spirals of individual fibres. So regular. I was amazed by the quality of this textile.’
2 | X-ray fluorescence
In the second line of research, Leila Sauvage, associate professor of Book and Paper Conservation, is firing X-rays at the portraits. This gives atoms an energetic jolt that makes electrons jump around and emit energy. Since the radiation emitted by each chemical element has a unique spectral fingerprint, Sauvage can use this information to distil a portrait’s elements signature.
A caveat is that only heavier atoms can cause this fluorescence of X-rays. Lead, chromium, iron, zinc and copper, for example, are elements that are easily visible. They can also provide vital information about pigment use. Lead, for example, was used to make white lead, and iron to make earthy, ochre tones.
3 | By spectroscopy
By looking at the long-wave infrared spectrum, the cameras can also see through the top layer of paint applied to a canvas. To demonstrate this, Erdmann opens an image of John the Baptist in the Wilderness by Hieronymus Bosch (1499), which he has also analysed using this method. The image shows the saint robed in red, reclining beside an impressive plant bearing a massive, tomato-like fruit.
When Erdmann switches to an infrared reflectography image of the paining, the tomato turns into a man. ‘Legend has it that the man who commissioned the painting was supposed to be painted next to the saint he was named after, but when Bosch had finished the painting, he refused to pay. Bosch was so angry that he overpainted the figure of the man.’ Whether the mummy portraits will divulge similar secrets remains to be seen.
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Digital mummies and the human mummy complex
Teasing out the biography of these portraits is ultimately about more than filling in our understanding of the past, Erdmann notes. ‘That biography carries on into the future. Knowing how these panel portraits were made and what materials were used will help us to better preserve them for generations to come.’ But even with the best of care, deterioration is inevitable. ‘These are natural materials. They change. But at least now we have digital copies documenting their current state in the minutest detail.’ The data underlying the images on Erdmann’s screen constitute a digital mummy of the mummy portrait, as it were.
These portraits took time, diligence and craftsmanship to make. A far cry from the energy and effort that goes into ‘immortalising’ ourselves today. But have we actually become better at picturing ourselves? To this question, Media Studies Professor Patricia Pisters responds: ‘We are so flooded with portraits these days, with such an overload of selfies on our phones, that we can barely absorb all these images any more. In fact, you then need to make a selection from all of those images to distil anything of value.’
In film theory, painting and sculpture are seen as manifestations of a human ‘mummy complex’ – that is, our own quest for immortality. Photography is particularly important, according to Pisters, as it has traditionally offered the most direct representation of reality, with little artistic interference. ‘But photography has increasingly come to resemble painting,’ Pisters continues. ‘With all the filters and photoshopping, the supposed direct relationship with reality is gone.’ Indeed, today’s selfies may actually be closer to the portraits of old. Zooming in on those long eyelashes or the pronounced whites of the mummy portrait’s eyes, it is easy to see parallels with the Instagram filters used today.
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Picture: Pexels
Picture: Pexels
Raw materials, energy and water
Photoshopped or not, the fact is that digital images are not as immortal as we tend to assume, Pisters observes. ‘Preserving digital images also requires updating systems or converting them to other formats. That means you're always making choices. What should we convert and what not? What do we carry with us into the future, what do we leave behind? Moreover, digital storage is material, too. You need raw materials, energy, and water to cool the servers. So, this future is not assured.’
Nodding towards the mummy portrait on her computer screen, Pisters continues: ‘We still see and understand this portrait, with these pigments, 1,700 years after the fact. Whether anyone will be able to retrieve that one perfect selfie of us 1,700 years from now is doubtful.’
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Who are the portraits of?
The individuals shown in these mummy portraits are mostly descendants of Greek soldiers who settled in Egypt during the Hellenistic period (332-30 BC). In 30 BC, Egypt came under Roman rule. Greek people living there had a different social status from the Roman citizens, but most were upper middle class. With money enough for expensive funerals, which cost the equivalent of around 400 days’ wages. Among the 1,100 extant portraits, there are fractionally more of women than men, and 7% show children. A notable feature are the Roman hairstyles and accessories. Van den Bercken: ‘As though the deceased wished to underline that aspect of their identities.’
Where are the portraits from?
Around 1,000 mummy portraits are known worldwide, 38 of which are presented in the exhibition Face to Face. The People Behind Mummy Portraits. Allard Pierson is conducting a major provenance study to trace the history of the portraits in its own collection. When were these portraits discovered? And how? In archaeological excavations or clandestine digs? How did they come into the collection? Curator Ben van den Bercken: ‘The exhibition also addresses this research in order to draw other scholars and the interested public into the discussion.’
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Researchers and further information
Allard Pierson
The images in this production were provided by Allard Pierson. All about the exhibition, tickets and more information can be found on their website.
Ben van den Bercken
Ben van den Bercken is curator of the Egypt and Sudan Collection at the Allard Pierson. He has taken part in excavations in Egypt and is currently studying mummy portraits and the history of the Allard Pierson’s Egypt and Sudan Collection.
Robert Erdmann
Robert Erdmann is professor of Conservation and Restoration and affiliated with both the Faculty of Humanities’ Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage programme, and the Institute of Physics at the Faculty of Science. He is also a senior researcher at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Erdmann harnesses the latest technologies in machine learning and artificial intelligence to learn more about iconic works of art.
Patricia Pisters
Patricia Pisters is professor of Film, Media and Culture. She works at the interface of film studies, media studies and philosophy, analysing contemporary visual culture and investigating how images influence our thinking. Her past research has looked at Hitchcock’s work and examined the work of female film-makers, new Hollywood aesthetics and Dutch film culture.