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While ancient Egyptian mummy portraits have long been objects of curiosity, only a minimal amount of scholarship exists about them. Many questions have lingered since they were uncovered by archeologists around the Egyptian city of Fayum in the late 1800s.
Who painted them? What pigments and substrates did the artists use, and where were these materials procured? Were the paintings made during the subject’s life or after death?
In 2003, the conservator Marie Svoboda made it her mission to unravel these mysteries. She’d recently joined the ranks of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and while the institution’s collection was rich and sprawling, a small group of 16 works caught her attention.
The detailed, wide-eyed faces in these paintings, known as mummy portraits, date back to 100 to 250 C.E. Each of them had…
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