i accidentally typed out 3 pages of this john berger essay on the fayum portraits
They are the earliest painted portraits that have survived; they were painted whilst the Gospels of the New Testament were being written. Why then do they strike us today as being so immediate? Why does their individuality feel like our own? Why is their look more contemporary than any look to be found in the rest of the two millennia of traditional European art which followed them? The Fayum portraits touch us, as if they had been painted last month. Why? This is the riddle.
… (theres a whole bunch i left out here about how they were painted and for what purpose, but suffice to say they were painted as sort of a “passport photo” to the afterlife to be buried along with the mummy of the person portrayed.)
I want now to consider just two actions. First, the act of a Fayum portrait being painted, and, second, the action of our looking at one today.
Neither those who ordered the portraits, nor those who painted them, ever imagined their being seen by posterity. They were images destined to be buried, without a visible future.
This meant that there was a special relationship between painter and sitter. The sitter had not yet become a model, and the painter had not yet become a broker for future glory. Instead, the two of them, living at that moment, collaborated in preparation for death, a preparation which would ensure survival. To paint was to name, and to be named was a guarantee of this continuity.
In other words. the Fayum painter was summoned not to make a portrait, as we have come to understand the term, but to register his client, a man or a woman, looking at him. It was the painter rather than the model who submitted to being looked at. Each portrait he made began with this act of submission. We should consider those works not as portraits, but as paintings about the experience of being looked at by Aline, Flavian, Isarous, Claudine…
The address, the approach is different from anything we find later in the history of portraits. Later ones were painted for posterity, offering evidence of the once living to future generations. Whilst still being painted, they were imagined in the past tense, and the painter, painting, addressed his sitter in the third person - either singular or plural - He, She, They, as I observed them. This is why so many of them look old even when they are not.
For the Fayum painter the situation was very different. He submitted to the look of the sitter, for whom he was Death’s painter, or perhaps more precisely, Eternity’s painter. And the sitter’s look, to which he submitted, addressed him in the second person singular. So that his reply - which was the act of painting - used the same personal pronoun: Toi, Tu, Esy, Ty… who is here. This in part explains their immediacy.
Looking at these ‘portraits’, which were not destined for us, we find ourselves caught in the spell of a very special contractual intimacy. The contract may be hard for us to grasp, but the look speaks to us, particularly to us today.
If the Fayum portraints had been unearthed earlier, during, say, the eighteenth century, they would, I believe, have been considered as little more than a curiosity. To a confident, expansive culture these little paintings on linen or wood would probably have seemed diffident, clumsy, cursory, repetitive, uninspired.
The situation at the end of our century is different. The future has been, for the moment, downsized, and the past is being made redundant. Meanwhile the media surrioud people with an unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces. The faces harangue ceaselessly by provoking envy, new appetites, ambition, or, occasionally, pity combined with a sense of impotence. Further, the images of all these faces are processed and selected in order to harangue as noisily as possible, so that one appeal out-pleads and eliminates the next appeal. And people come to depend upon this impersonal noise as a proof of being alive!
Imagine then what happens when somebody comes upon the silence of the Fayum faces and stops short. Images of men and women making no appeal whatsoever, asking for nothing, yet declaring themselves, and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect. They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift.
There is a second reason why the Fayum portraits speak today. This century, as has been pointed out many times, is the century of emigration, enforced and voluntary. That is to say , a century of partings without end, and a century haunted by the memories of those partings.
The sudden anguish of missing what is no longer there is like suddenly coming upon a jar which has fallen and broken into fragments. Alone you collect the pieces, discover how to fit them together, and then carefully stick them to one another, one by one. Eventually the jar is reassembled, but it is not the same as it was before. It has become both flawed and more precious. Something comparable happens to the image of a loved place or a loved person when kept in the memory after separation.
The Fayum portraits touch a similar wound in a similar way. The painted faces, too, are flawed, and more precious than the living one was, sitting there in the painter’s workshop, where there was a smell of melting beeswax. Flawed because very evidently hand-made. More precious because the painted gaze is entirely concentrated on the life it knows it will one day lose.
And so they gaze upon us, the Fayum portraits, like the missing of our own century.
dededos
turnnoffyourmind
origamiaround
snowghoul
discoholicmusic
jbbartram-illu
yousharknotpass
areudirty
