Listening 2 Section 4 Part 1

Listening 2 Section 4 Part 1

Listen to the recording once and complete the sentences. Type in NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.

1. After 322 BC, many people 1 to settle in the Fayum.

2. The new Inhabitants of the Fayum Introduced the custom of placing apicture 2 of the mummy.

3. The pictures were made of coloured 3 spread onto a wooden board.

4. William Petrie believed the pictures were painted 4 of the person.

5. He said the pictures were unusual because of their 5 style.

6. The pictures may have originally been displayed 6 of the people they showed.

Answers

1. Greece
2. over the face
3. wax
4. in the life
5. realistic
6. in the houses

1. Listen again and look carefully at the following extract from the transcript: "larger numbers of businessmen and officials who had come over from Greece settled in this fertile region with their families."
2. Listen again and look carefully at the following extract from the transcript: "These newcomers made one distinctive innovation, though: after binding the mummy, they laid over the face a picture representing the person inside."
3. Listen again and look carefully at the following extract from the transcript: "The portraits look like oil on canvas, but they were actually produced using a technique called encaustic, where the artist applies pigmented wax to a wooden board with a small spatula."
4. Listen again and look carefully at the following extract from the transcript: "The Egyptologist William Petrie, who discovered many of these mummies with their accompanying portraits at the end of the nineteenth century, was convinced that they were actually done in the lifetime of the subject, rather than being painted after the person's death, as had been the case with older Egyptian paintings."
5. Listen again and look carefully at the following extract from the transcript: "He felt they were very different from the traditional stylised images that had been used on Egyptian mummy casings in previous centuries, and was convinced that they were actually portraits, giving a realistic depiction of the person."
6. Listen again and look carefully at the following extract from the transcript: "He pointed out that the boards on which they were painted showed signs of having been cut down to size to fit within the mummy bandages. To him this suggested that they may have originally been larger and been hung in the houses of the owners during their lifetimes."

In the last lectures, we looked at the art of the ancient Egyptians, and then considered the art of other ancient Mediterranean civilisations, in particular Greece and Rome. We're now going to return to Egypt to consider a set of very unusual pictures known as the Fayum portraits.

The Fayum is a lush green area about 100 kilometres west of Cairo. Following the conquest of Egypt by the Greek warrior Alexander the Great in 332 bc, large numbers of businessmen and officials who had come over from Greece settled in this fertile region with their families. They gradually adopted some features of Egyptian culture, including the practice of mummification, embalming the bodies of their dead and wrapping them in linen bandages in order to preserve them as mummies (the name actually comes from an Arabic word meaning 'an embalmed body'). These newcomers made one distinctive innovation, though: after binding the mummy, they laid over the face a picture representing the person inside.

The portraits look like oil on canvas, but they were actually produced using a technique called encaustic, where the artist applies pigmented wax to a wooden board with a small spatula. The Egyptologist William Petrie, who discovered many of these mummies with their accompanying portraits at the end of the nineteenth century, was convinced that they were actually done in the lifetime of the subject, rather than being painted after the person's death, as had been the case with older Egyptian paintings. He felt they were very different from the traditional stylised images that had been used on Egyptian mummy casings in previous centuries, and was convinced that they were actually portraits, giving a realistic depiction of the person. He pointed out that the boards on which they were painted showed signs of having been cut down to size to fit within the mummy bandages. To him this suggested that they may have originally been larger and been hung in the houses of the owners during their lifetimes.

But, more than a century after they came to light, nobody knew how far they were really depictions of real people, as against idealised portraits. Then a team from ManchesterUniversity decided to find out, by recreating the faces of Fayum mummies in clay, and then comparing the reconstructions with the portraits. The team was provided with skulls from two Fayum mummies from the BritishMuseum, and given the information, based on X-rays and other evidence, that one of the mummies was of a 50-year-old man, and the other was a woman in her early twenties. Armed only with this information, they set to work.

First, they created copies of the skulls. Then they used clay to build up the facial muscles in order to reconstruct what the person looked like. After weeks of painstaking labour, two faces emerged. Only then were the two portraits revealed, so that the match between the reconstructions and the portraits could be examined.

In the case of the man, both model and portrait showed a broad flat face with a slightly hooked nose and a fleshy mouth, with broad lips, but the man in the portrait was noticeable for his 'five o'clock shadow', the beard beginning to grow around his chin and on his cheeks. This would have been quite a recognisable feature of the man in real life, and an easy thing for the painter to copy. However, it wasn't something that the makers of the model could know about. In the reconstruction, the right eye was slightly higher than the left - and this was the same on the portrait. But on the portrait, the eyes were very large, which is standard with many of the Fayum portraits, while in the model they were longer and narrower.

The portrait of the woman appeared to be even more of a standard type, with her large eyes, straight nose and small mouth. These pretty, feminine features suggested this could be an idealised woman's face, and yet it proved to match the reconstruction surprisingly closely. The proportions of the lower face corresponded, and so did those of the forehead, though in the portrait the eyes were closer together and larger than in the reconstruction. And in both cases, the head was set on a solid neck, suggesting a more powerful physique than you might have expected from these delicate features.

So overall, the similarities between the portraits and the models are too close to be accidental. The artists may have started from a standard picture, but attempts were made to modify this to reflect the characteristics of the subject - what gave the face its personal qualities. Obviously this isn't much of a sample upon which to judge an entire genre of portraiture, but the researchers are convinced that, on the whole, the artists aimed to represent their subjects as they appeared in real life, whether this was flattering to them or not.