http://www.penn.museum/sites/artifactlab/
APPEAR Project – Fayum Mummy Portraits
Hi! This is Eve Mayberger and I am a curriculum intern from New York University. I am currently spending nine months at the Penn Museum as part of my fourth-year internship. I want to introduce one of the projects I am working on in the Artifact Lab. The Ancient Panel Painting: Examination Research and Analysis (APPEAR) project is a Getty Institute initiative to create an international database on Fayum mummy portraits. A website was created to allow different types of analysis and imaging to be uploaded and shared with other institutions participating in the APPEAR project.
The Penn Museum has three Fayum mummy portraits in its collection [E16212, E16213, and E16214]. These portraits date from the Roman period in Egypt and were executed in either encaustic (wax) or tempera. The portraits depict a boy, a young man, and a woman. The figures are painted on thin panels of wood that are adhered together. Remember that wood was a rare and expensive material in ancient Egypt and every tiny piece of wood was valuable.
All three portraits have been repaired at some point in their history. One of my challenges is going to be to differentiate the original materials from later additions. Fortunately, the Penn Museum has the old treatment records that will hopefully be useful to piece together the treatment history of these objects.
After carefully examining the portraits, I took them down the photography studio in the main conservation lab. These high-resolution photos will be uploaded to the APPEAR website. In the upcoming weeks, I will be using imaging and non-destructive analysis to further investigate these mummy portraits.
Be sure to visit the blog in the upcoming weeks to read more about APPEAR project!
Eve Mayberger, Curriculum Intern
Egypt-bound
Yes, that's right, I'm going to Egypt and I'm leaving tonight.
I have the great fortune to be joining the Penn excavations in South Abydos for a couple weeks to carry out conservation work on some of the recent finds. The team is led by Dr. Josef Wegner, Egyptian Section Associate Curator at the Penn Museum. This will be my first visit to Egypt, but not my first time working on an excavation (nor will it be my first time working in a desert in the winter!). I'm really excited for this opportunity and I'm looking forward to seeing in person the sites and finds that I've heard so much about over the last 3 years since beginning my job In the Artifact Lab. I'm not sure what kind of updates I'll be able to provide from the field, but I'll certainly be posting about my experience once I return in mid-January. Since I'm not there yet, I don't have any photos to share, but if you want to see some images of the site and read about a graduate student's recent experience there, check out this blog post on the museum blog for a taste of what I'll be doing/seeing.
