 My name is Marie Svoboda. I'm an associate conservator here at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Villa. And my specialty is antiquities, conserving and working on ancient material in the collection. But I have a particular interest in studying the technology of these objects, how they were made and created. Not only decorated, but just fabricated, ceramics, stone. And one of my particular interests are Romano-Egyptian mummy portraits, of which the Getty has about 16 in our collection, exquisite portraits that basically range from the first to the third century AD. Most of them are painted on wooden panels. Two of them are on textile. And they're quite fascinating because they talk about not only who the people were who lived in Egypt during the time, the Romans, the Greeks, the multicultural mix of people living during this time. They not only talks about their status based on the jewelry they wear, the clothing that they wear, but it also talks about the artists that created them and who those artists were, the workshops that they worked in, where they got their materials, how they were produced and one of our interests is being able to look at many of these portraits outside of our collection to begin to understand if there are hands of artists that we can identify and workshops and to be able to understand the trade and use of materials and the production of it, which is of great interest to me. We were talking about pigments and the use of colors on these ancient artifacts, not only on mummy portraits, but also on sculptures, marble sculptures, and even on vases. We see that on pieces in our collection such as the Kirch vase, which is a remarkable piece that has post-fired paint applied on it. It has a whole beautiful color palette. Looking at the pigment palette that was used in antiquity is fascinating because you see a lot of materials used that would be sourced locally. Those are a lot of basic materials such as the earth pigments. These are inorganic materials that were mined and selected for their colors and cleaned, purified ground and used for painting. But also we begin to see the use of organic pigments such as the dyes that we see used for textiles. If mordants are added to the dyes, they can produce pigments or lake colors. Those are used also for painting and we find a lot of matter used on marble sculptures, a lot of the pieces within our collection. On the portraits they're used for depicting garments, which is really interesting as we discussed. It's fascinating they would be using dyes to show textile or garments on these portraits, but not using those same colorings for painting the background or the faces or parts of the portrait. I find the production of these materials fascinating and I find their approach to creating more colors than was available to them in their normal, natural palette by mixing these colors. If they wanted to create a purple, maybe to imitate the very valuable Tyrian purple, they would mix matter and indigo. If they wanted to produce green, which you would think would be a very ubiquitous color, maybe an earth green or a copper based green, which they could have even made by corroding copper metal. But we're finding a lot of mixtures to produce green and those include or permit and indigo mixed together. That is a pigment that they use not only for mixing with the indigo to produce green, but they reserve that pigment specifically for painting jewelry and very delicate features on some of the portraits because or permit has very large platelet like crystals in its particle size. Those reflect light and they have a really beautiful quality to them that are more shimmery than if you were to be using just yellow ochre. We have a wonderful example in our collection where there's a wreath that one of the portrait sitters is wearing, a male portrait. He has a wreath of olive branches in his hair and it has the leaves and then it has little kind of yellow berries on it and the leaves are a mixture of indigo and or permit to produce the green. But the berries are painted with yellow ochre because they probably could not get the intense yellow using just pure or permit. So they could get a much pure brighter yellow using yellow ochre. So you see that they're not just using what was available, but they have the selection of pigments and colors for various purposes. They're really approaching it in a way that makes sense. That's practical, economical. And then, for example, the differences we see in some of the production of these mummy portraits and I'm sure with the quality of many other types of sculpture is that you're commissioned or hired to create something. You put a lot of money towards it. You're going to have a very good product. You're going to have imported wood from Northern Europe brought into Egypt. You're going to have the best pigments. You're going to have gold decoration. You're going to have all these elements that indicate that that's a higher economic status, higher social status in their production. And then those that are kind of more inferior, not as good quality, but still the desire to have these portraits produced or beautiful artifacts produced or to be surrounded by these materials. Everybody had that desire and that was a sign of, I think, kind of status and wealth. But again, you see the broad spectrum like today. I mean, it's not very different than it is today. And I find kind of coming in from the end of an artist and how an artist would have produced something is a very exciting direction because it spans into many other facets of antiquity, like imported materials, production, workshops, chemistry, and there's no end to the kind of discovery of things that we can learn from them. Right, right. It seems like now, again, this might be more of a question for when you're finished. I wonder if the cheaper portraits, the ones where whoever's commissioning them has a lower budget, if you're going to see a lot more earth pigments in those and a lot fewer of the sort of more exotic pigments. No, I think we are seeing that for sure. You're definitely seeing kind of not the high quality of materials being used. But what's really interesting about kind of, and I even hate to call them lower quality, but kind of more of maybe a simplistic approach to their production, is that the artist becomes a much more stylized. They have a better identifying feature, signature style of painting. So they have kind of a characteristic way of doing the eye and the lips. So you are more able to find portraits that match that. Right. You begin to really see the hand of the artist in those that are more caricature-like, where the ones that are really high quality and fine, they're such beautiful paintings that, though you can make some comparisons, they kind of have not so many distinguishing features that help you define or identify a particular artist. It was a business. They were making and producing these things for selling and for use, and it wasn't this precious one-off thing, I think that it was, you're looking at a really big business of major production. Right. And when you look at it that way and you think about it, it really begins to kind of, you feel a real connection to it because you can really relate and understand that. Yeah, yeah. That's one of those other, I think, sort of disconnects that students have, particularly with ancient through early modern art, is the idea of art having a function, beyond simply being art for art's sake. Right, exactly. You know, and I think that's one of the things that makes art history sort of intimidating for the novice, but then can ultimately be sort of reassuring in a way when you finally connect to that idea. Right. You know, that it's a thing and it has a purpose. That's right. That's absolutely right. It's fascinating. So what sorts of earth pigments can you be a little bit more exact on some of the tones? Well, I mean, you know, we're finding iron oxides. Right. So we're finding a lot of different tones ranging from yellows, a lot of browns and reds. Sometimes we find pure hematite, very, very pure hematite. Oh, wow. But that's the biggest range that we see there. And actually, most of the paintings have a lot of earth tones. That's what they're mostly composed of, as far as skin tones, background. You can even get sort of a buff out of ochre. Yeah. Yeah, you can get it. Absolutely. And, you know, they would have mixed them also with lead white or calcite colors to produce the tones that they wanted for creating them. Right. So when you're looking under a microscope at a portrait, you can see all of these pigments mixed together to produce the flesh tone. But also, you know, sometimes pure color just to add kind of a highlight or a flash on detail. And it's pretty amazing to me. Oh, they're so rewarding when you really examine them up close. Exactly. I remember going into that Bummy Portrait Room at the Louvre and just looking closely at just how sophisticated the brushwork is.