Lo sguardo eterno. Storia e tecnica dell'encausto dalle origini ai ritratti del Fayum. Ediz. italiana e inglese
Editore: Espera
Anno edizione: 2012
Pagine: 54 p. , ill. , Brossura
- EAN: 9788890644344
Foreword
There have been many accounts of the ancient practice of encaustic painting, but nearly all have
been written by archaeologists or art-historians. There have been numerous exhibitions of the
Egyptian mummy portraits of the Roman period from the Fayum and elsewhere – one thinks
particularly of that organised by the British Museum in 1997. There have been conferences about
the subject and at the symposium
held in Heraklion in 1998 there was much discussion of the concept of
‘Fayumismos’: what made these portraits special, and how they related to and influenced
(or perhaps did not influence) the later Byzantine icon painters.
Paolo Fundarò’s approach to this intriguing subject is different, because he comes
at it as a painter, not as an archaeologist or a historian, and because he comes at
it as a painter fascinated by the techniques and the materials involved. His introduction
thus makes interesting reading, because he tackles the ancient authors
not as a literary historian or a textual critic but as someone who has actually tried
to put their accounts into practice. As a result his interpretations are not always
those that one has come to expect, and one may not always agree with them, but
he makes one look afresh at those accounts: that can only be a good thing.
And of course he backs it all up with his own paintings, executed in the encaustic
technique and in others which he believes throw light on the way in which the ancient
artists worked. Some are ‘copies’ of familiar ancient portraits, undertaken
to explore and to demonstrate the technique; others are totally – and excitingly –
new. No-one would confuse Paolo Fundarò’s paintings with the portraits from the
Fayum to which they are the heirs, for they are – naturally – painted in the spirit
of another age: nonetheless they should make us reconsider those ancient paintings,
and at the same time look with fascination at where this long-neglected technique
may lead.
Is this twenty-first-century Fayumismos?
A.J.N.W. Prag,
Hon. Professor in the Manchester Museum and Professor Emeritus of Classics, The Manchester
Museum, University of Manchester.
