edited by Marie Svoboda and Caroline Cartwright
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2026
Paper: 978-1-60606-996-7
eISBN: 978-1-60606-999-8 (ePub)
eISBN: 978-1-60606-998-1 (PDF)
Nearly a thousand funerary portraits from Roman Egypt, once interred with mummified remains, survive in museums around the world. These fascinating paintings offer the unparalleled opportunity for viewers to come face-to-face with people who lived and died some two thousand years ago.
The international collaboration known as APPEAR (Ancient Panel Paintings: Examination, Analysis, and Research) was launched in 2013 to promote the study of these objects and gather research findings in a shared database. This second volume of Mummy Portraits of Roman Egypt compiles seventeen scholarly papers from the APPEAR conference hosted in October 2022 at the Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam. Conservators, scientists, and curators presented new research on topics such as technical imaging; nondestructive analytical techniques; provenance and collecting; treatment histories; connoisseurship and forgeries; comparisons of works across institutions; and scientific studies of woods, pigments, coatings, binders, and supports. This volume will be a valuable resource to conservators, scientists, curators, and collectors.
The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at getty.edu/publications/mummy-portraits-2/ and includes zoomable illustrations and graphs. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.
Caroline Cartwright is senior scientist in the Department of Scientific Research at the British Museum. She is coeditor of Mummy Portraits of Roman Egypt: Emerging Research from the APPEAR Project (Getty, 2020).
“The second volume of Mummy Portraits of Roman Egypt yields further rich insights into the research of the international, interdisciplinary collaboration that underpins the APPEAR project and this publication. The breadth and depth of articles—whether from the perspective of Egyptology, conservation, scientific study, or the history of collecting—reflect the expertise and scholarship of their contributors. The volume is generously illustrated and easily navigable, making clever, intuitive use of the interactive possibilities of the online publication.”
—Dr. David Saunders, Honorary Research Fellow, British Museum, and Honorary Researcher, National Gallery, London
“This volume illustrates that the growing corpus of scientifically analyzed painted panel portraits from Roman Egypt sharpens our understanding of complex materials, techniques, and provenances: from wood preferences to the illusive Punic wax, and from forgeries to reworking and restoration.”
—Ben van den Bercken, Curator of the Collection of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, Allard Pierson, University of Amsterdam
License: CC BY-NC 4.0
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