 In this case study, we're going to be looking primarily at a type of portraiture called faeum portraits. These were mummy portraits that were painted during the late Egyptian period and the reason that we call them faeum portraits is that most of them were found in an area of Egypt close to the faeum oasis. They're sort of a depression to the west of the Nile Delta to the west and a little south and there's a series of lakes there and communities and many of these late period Roman mummies were found there. And I'm showing you here a selection of these faeum portraits. As you can see they are painted on wood panel. Most of them are painted either, well they tend to be painted either in in caustic, which is the technique we're going to pay attention to in this particular case study. Some are painted in tempera. So within caustic what you're doing is you're suspending your pigment in melted beeswax. Sometimes that beeswax is mixed with other substances. It can be mixed with oil to form something that dries and hardens more slowly and can be worked for a longer period or it can be mixed with types of varnish and other things. With tempera on the other hand you are mixing your paint with some sort of a binder like egg yolk or egg white or whole egg and painting with it that way. The more expensive portraits tended to be done with in caustic. Here we're looking at the portrait that was on the right in our image earlier and taking a closer look we're looking at her from sort of a raking angle so that you can see some of the texture of the in caustic paint and then just a close-up of this young woman's face. And one of the advantages of working in the in caustic medium is that of course beeswax is translucent and depending on how saturated it is with pigment you can actually build up sort of semi-transparent layers of this paint and get sort of a luminous quality that is a very good imitation of human skin and the way that light plays on human skin. And I think you can see that particularly in the close-up image on the right where we see all of the different shades in this young woman's face. You can also see a variety of different textures, little swirly patterns or little quick dabs or slashes made with the brush. When you work with in caustic you have to work very quickly because it hardens right on the brush almost the moment you take your brush out of the hot wax and so you have to have a pretty good idea of what you're doing before you even grab your brush or the tool that you're working with. You can heat the surface that you're painting on to some degree and by warming it up extend the amount of time that you can paint but you have to work very quickly and you tend to build up sort of solid layers that end up having a bit of a sculptural effect because of just that buildup of the wax. So it's a really interesting way to work. Now we have a view and a detail of a male portrait, another one of these Faya Mummy portraits, and I want to point out a couple of things. First, take a look at the relative state of disrepair on this particular work and because of the flaking paint on the surface you can get a sense for how thickly the layers build up on the wood surface. You can also get a sense of how this would have been placed into the wrappings of the mummy. Only the face area and sort of the head and neck and immediate shoulders were meant to actually be seen. The rest of this would be covered up in mummy wrappings and so this is just standing in for the face of the deceased. There's a real emphasis on the eyes of these. In the ancient world there were widespread beliefs that eyes were the windows to the soul and of course in the Egyptian tradition they believed that the soul lived on in the afterlife and needed a home to go back to in the form of the mummified body of the deceased and also other statues that would be provided and so perhaps these eyes are allowing particular access for the Ka. Recently works like these Faya portraits have received a lot of scholarly and particularly scientific attention and there have been a number of groups worldwide that have been analyzing these Faya mummy portraits. There was a huge project in Germany that well it was started in Germany that spread also into Italy and into parts of Egypt to Mount Sinai for example that was a look at painting techniques for the representation of human flesh between about the year 250 and 1200 and they they did these really in-depth analyses including pigment analysis and one of the things that I'm showing you here is this is on the right sort of an ultraviolet light look at the painting that you see on the left and when you expose certain pigments to UV light they fluoresce and so here what they're doing is identifying the presence of Egyptian blue which is a synthetic cobalt based glass pigment and it's does tend to fluoresce under those light conditions. A slightly more destructive way to study a painting but one that gives a great deal of information is to take a cross section of a layer of paint. This is usually done in an area very close to the edge of a painting or in an area that's already been damaged and here you're seeing sort of a microscopic view of a cross section of paint and you can see that there are at least three distinct layers and again you're looking you're seeing it analyzed under various types of light including I think x-ray in the image on the bottom. When you zoom way into one of these encaustic portraits one of these Faya mummy portraits you can see a lot of the individual colors that were laid next to each other and on top of each other in order to create effects and so here we're looking at a woman's portrait and at a close-up of the way that her eye was painted and in a moment we'll see a short clip that reproduces that technique. What we'll do now is look at the way that an eye very much like the one we saw on the last slide was painted and this is something that was achieved through analysis of paint sections and also just really close microscopic analysis of the painting and so what I want you to notice is that almost all of the colors in this painting are ochre-derived or ochre-based colors so here even in the background we have sort of a pinkish tone that could be red ochre with a lot of white in it now we have this sort of buff tone that's yellow ochre with a lot of white now we have like a dye an orange ochre that's been lightened and then we're getting closer into sort of a red ochre like a burnt sienna but all of these are earth pigments they're incredibly stable and light fast they hold up over time very well and now finally as we start getting darker you'll see that eventually the artist will bring in full black here and then for that final pop the white. This is our final slide in this case study and I want you to notice the photo of the little steel tool at the lower left this is a reproduction of an encaustic wax working tool that is based on the marks that were found on the painting that you see here and as you can see on then the top two images you see it sort of straight on and then examined with raking light so that you get really high contrast imagery that gives you a sense of sort of the topography of the painting and then there's this wonderful magnified view at the lower right in which you can see the diamond shapes that were created by the tool being pressed in to manipulate the wax metal tools like this could be heated up and used to move around the wax on the surface of one of these paintings and to to further mix and move the paint for different effects. You're going to be watching another video about works like this in which Maurice Boboda who is a conservator at the Getty Villa in California will discuss a little bit more about ochre and the way that works like this were made