IN THE West naturalistic portraiture began in classical times. Well-stocked museums in Europe and America are full of busts depicting recognisable individuals. Painting, though, is a more precarious art form. Paint peels. Wood and canvas backings rot. Frescoes crumble and fall. Few painted portraits survive from the classical period, but arid desert conditions have preserved one set: the funerary mummy pictures of the second century AD, from Tebtunis in Egypt. These portraits, affixed to mummies’ bandages, depict the defunct in fresh and lifelike detail. Though neglected when they were rediscovered just over a century ago, they are now subject to intense scientific scrutiny. One of the scrutineers, Marc Walton of Northwestern University, in Illinois, told the AAAS meeting what he and his colleagues have found.
One conclusion is that they can assign groups of portraits to particular artists. The three shown, for example, seem to be by the same hand. Dr Walton’s method here is to map each picture’s contours by illuminating it sequentially from many directions, building a relief map from the resulting patterns of light and shade. This reveals both the...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1mK2DoT
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