Late Antique Portraits and Early Christian Icons

The Power of the Painted Gaze

Andrew Paterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000600223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art antique

This book focuses on the earliest surviving Christian icons, dated to the sixth and seventh centuries, which bear many resemblances to three other well-established genres of 'sacred portrait' also produced during late antiquity, namely Roman imperial portraiture, Graeco-Egyptian funerary portraiture and panel paintings depicting non-Christian deities.

Andrew Paterson addresses two fundamental questions about devotional portraiture – both Christian and non-Christian – in the late antique period. Firstly, how did artists visualise and construct these images of divine or sanctified figures? And secondly, how did their intended viewers look at, respond to, and even interact with these images? Paterson argues that a key factor of many of these portrait images is the emphasis given to the depicted gaze, which invites an intensified form of personal encounter with the portrait's subject.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, theology, religion and classical studies.

1The Production of Sacred Portraits (i)Techniques and Stylistic Variation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003143109-2

The Physical Format of the Framed Pinax

The small extant corpus of sacred pinakes or panel paintings depicting non-Christian deities – all produced in the Fayum during the same period as the mummy portraits – has received increased scholarly attention in recent years.¹ The fragmentary nature of this corpus can be partly explained by the fact that they were discovered, not in tombs like the mummy portraits, but in buildings originally above ground, the likelihood of survival being therefore much lower. The extant examples evidently formed part of a larger visual culture of sacred art in the Fayum at this period, and they now represent the only surviving examples of a major Hellenistic art form, the portable framed painting on wood. The practice of painting on portable panels during this period is illustrated by a unique painted image, dated to the late first century CE, found on the interior wall of a sarcophagus from Kerch in the Crimea, which depicts a painter at work in his studio (Figure 1.1).² The painter is shown seated beside his large compartmentalised palette mounted on a column-like stand, next to which is presumably a heater of some sort containing his softened wax medium. It is not clear whether the tool which the painter is holding out towards the heater is a brush or a metallic implement called a cauterium. To the right of the palette stands an easel bearing a rectangular panel or pinax, whose surface is apparently blank, but which is already provided with a distinctive eight-pointed frame of the sort also found in the Fayum. On the wall of the workshop are displayed three bust-format portraits, two in medallion format with decorative borders and one in a square format with another eight-pointed frame like the one on the easel.

Figure 1.1 A Painter at Work in his Studio. Sarcophagus, Bosporan Kingdom. First century CE. Crimea, the environs of Kerch. St Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum (P.1899–81). Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Leonard Kheifets.

Although the artist depicted in this scene seems to have been a specialist in private portraiture, the same pinax format was equally used for images of deities and rulers, as well as early Christian icons. There are several references in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (composed c. 77 CE) to such pinakes, or tabulae in Latin, depicting gods in a non-narrative format – specific compositions are not described, though several instances of enthroned figures suggest a frontal format.³ In one case Pliny mentions the arresting effect of the portrait’s painted gaze: about an image of Minerva painted by Famulus he comments that it ‘continued to face the viewer no matter from what angle he looked at it.’⁴

The surviving pinakes from the Fayum can be categorised into two physical formats – single framed panels and door panels originally attached to other panels or shrines which are now lost. All the single panels originally consisted of a number of planks of wood arranged vertically and held together by a frame, although in most cases the frame has been lost and planks have become separated; consequently, few of the panels remain complete. The presence of an unpainted border around the edge of panels that have lost their frames indicates that the panel was assembled and framed before the painting was begun, as is also implied by the scene on the Kerch sarcophagus. It is notable in this respect that the portrait of the emperor Septimius Severus and his family – the sole surviving example of a painted imperial portrait on panel, which was also produced in Egypt at roughly the same period as the corpus of pinakes – is exceptional in consisting of a single board; presumably, only imperial workshops were able to procure boards of such dimensions. It has been convincingly demonstrated that this panel was originally rectangular but cut to its present tondo format by a later hand.⁵

Four of the Fayum pinakes, including the one depicting Heron and Lycurgus now in Brussels (Figure 1.22), retain complete eight-pointed frames of the same type as those depicted in both the Kerch sarcophagus painting and a number of Pompeiian wall paintings.⁶ This type of frame has also survived on the unique example of a framed portrait of a woman discovered by Sir William Flinders Petrie in a tomb at Hawara in the Fayum, indicating that it was not a frame reserved solely for images of deities.⁷ It has been proposed that many of the mummy portraits may have been originally framed for domestic display before being later recycled for insertion into the mummy wrappings.⁸ However, this seems unlikely in view of the fact that the majority of the panels on which they are painted are extremely thin so as to allow for warping when inserted into the mummy wrappings – the portrait mummy of Artemidorus, discussed below, is an example of this effect. The producers of early Christian icons may well have adopted the same format of the framed pinax as their non-Christian counterparts.⁹ However, the only surviving original frame on an early Sinai icon – that belonging to the icon of Christ in Majesty (Figure 0.4) – consists of four bars meeting at the corners without extending beyond them; three of the corners are mitred, while at the upper-left corner the two bars meet at right angles. This frame carries part of an original inscription indicating the image’s function as a votive offering, and it is quite possible that other early icons would also have had inscriptions of this kind on their frames.¹⁰

Encaustic and Tempera Techniques

It is generally assumed that all the Fayum pinakes were painted in tempera, a water-based medium using animal glues or egg yolk as a binder, while mummy portraits were produced in either tempera or encaustic, a medium using pigments suspended in beeswax with resins and gums added. Most of the mummy portraits discovered in the Fayum came from two principal sites, Hawara and er-Rubayat, the cemeteries connected to the towns of Arsinoe and Philadelphia, respectively – nearly all the portraits from Hawara (e.g., Figure 1.2) were painted in encaustic, often on limewood panels, while those from er-Rubayat (e.g., Figure 1.3) were mostly executed in tempera, often on oak.¹¹ A small number of portraits from each site are painted directly on the linen shrouds covering the bodies rather than on panels.¹² Because of these differences in materials and techniques between the paintings from the two sites, it seems likely that each site possessed its own workshop.

Figure 1.2 Portrait of a Woman named Eirene. c. 37–50. Provenance unknown. Encaustic. 37 × 22 cm. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesmuseum, Antikensammlung 131 (MpSS 2/8). © BPK Image Agency.

Figure 1.3 Portrait of a Young Woman (the ‘Jewellery Girl’). c. 110–17. From Hawara. Encaustic. 44 × 34 cm. Edinburgh, National Museum of Scotland (1951.160). Image © National Museums Scotland.

The Use of Encaustic in the Mummy Portraits and Early Christian Icons

The principal literary source for an account of the encaustic technique of antiquity is Book XXXV of Pliny’s Natural History, but the information given there is somewhat perfunctory and ambiguous¹³; hence, various modern experiments have been undertaken to ascertain the tools and techniques used in the mummy portraits.¹⁴ These have led to the conclusion that many of the mummy portraits were painted using the classical tetrachromy or four-colour palette, which according to Pliny had previously been employed by Apelles and his contemporaries in the fourth century BCE.¹⁵ These four colours were white (either chalk or lead white), yellow (yellow ochre), red (red ochre, haematite or minium – i.e., red lead) and black (carbon, or what Pliny called atramentum).¹⁶

The remarkable chromatic range obtainable from ingenious mixing of these is demonstrated in many of the portraits. For example, despite the absence of a blue pigment, grey hues obtained by mixing white and black can nevertheless appear optically bluish when juxtaposed with adjacent flesh colours, as can be seen in the backgrounds of Figures 1.8 and 1.14. The Portrait of Eirene (Figure 1.2) is an outstanding example of how all the flesh tones have been blended from subtle mixtures of the four colours of the tetrachromy palette. For example, a cool, olive-green mid-tone (used in the shadow areas of the jawline, ear and neck, for instance) could be obtained by mixing the yellow pigment with smaller quantities of black and white, while warmer, brighter shades (especially on the illuminated areas of the cheeks and forehead) could be obtained by a mixture of the red and the yellow with greater quantities of white. The gold wreath on the woman’s head is painted with great tonal subtlety to suggest its leaves emerging from the hair to catch the light, highlights of pure yellow and white applied to their edges.¹⁷

The relatively even texture of the surface of this painting, and the smoothness of its tonal blending, indicates that the paint must have been applied by brush – for this to be practicable, the beeswax medium must have been emulsified by the...