More about Fayoum portraits

Fayoum portraits were made roughly between 300 BC and 300 ad and have come out of a really fascinating blend of cultures , the earlier are greco-Egyptian, the later ones roman-Egyptian.You can see this in the costuming of the people and the very reason for the existence of the portraits. Basically the Ptolemaic(greco-Egyptian) people who lived in Egypt had many customs continuous from ancient Egyptian ones. One major one was mummification of the dead, and the portrait was intended to over the face held in place by the body wrapping. It must have been highly spooky to open up a tomb and find a realistic face staring back at you. There is some evidence that the portraits may have been kept (obviously without the body attached) in families living rooms until a certain period. There are some full length portraits which have individuals wearing togas meeting Anubis presenting laurel wreaths. But the real reason why I love them is this one of the few examples of ancient art showing real relatively ordinary individuals painted so that we feel we could know them or meet them in the street. It brings the past so close.The quality of art and the different styles used too, reveal that art development is not the linear progression we often imagine it as, IE stylised, then realism and later abstract, but much more fluid.