In 2013 the Getty Museum initiated Ancient Panel Painting: Examination, Analysis, and Research (APPEAR) as an international collaborative project to collect technical information on ancient panel paintings, specifically funerary mummy portraits produced in Egypt during the Roman era, as a platform for comparative research and conservation of this important archaeological and art historical corpus. Through the participation of museums around the world, APPEAR has shed much light on the sourcing, materiality, and function of ancient Egyptian panel painting production, and it will continue to advance this research as more works are analyzed and documented on this platform. Already the project has done much to elucidate how the ancient artists worked and the pivotal contributions they made to the development of panel painting over the following millennium. In these portraits we see how people lived, worked, worshipped, and died in ancient Egypt, providing fascinating insights into one of the most dynamic periods of artistic cross-fertilization in antiquity.
APPEAR began as a study of the sixteen Romano-Egyptian panel paintings in the Getty Museum’s collection. Through the participation of institutions and colleagues around the world, it has since grown to encompass a third of the known panel paintings—currently residing in more than sixty museums and collections. The opportunity to study such a large body of material dating from the first through third centuries CE, reflecting a wide diversity of religious, cultural, artistic, and funerary traditions, is unique.
There is still much to discover, and further progress will depend on continuing collaboration between museums and scholars via a participant-led database. The dissemination of this information is facilitated by Getty’s support of the database, as well as conferences and publications.
With this publication, we are delighted to make available online and by print-on-demand the proceedings of the second APPEAR conference, held in 2022, Mummy Portraits of Roman Egypt, Volume 2: Emerging Research from the APPEAR Project. The papers in this publication and in the first volume, from the first conference in 2020 (https://www.getty.edu/publications/mummyportraits/), together with numerous exhibitions and technical and interpretive investigations that have evolved from the APPEAR project, are a tribute to the growing interest in cross-cultural research on the peoples and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and beyond. Finally, thanks for initiating and stewarding this project, along with its many dedicated collaborators, are due to Marie Svoboda, conservator of antiquities at the Getty Villa.
- Timothy PottsMaria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle DirectorJ. Paul Getty Museum