Once interred with mummified remains, nearly a thousand funerary portraits from Roman Egypt survive today in museums around the world, bringing viewers face-to-face with people who lived two thousand years ago. Until recently, few of these paintings had undergone in-depth study to determine by whom they were made and how.

An international collaboration known as APPEAR (Ancient Panel Paintings: Examination, Analysis, and Research) was launched in 2013 to promote the study of these objects and to gather scientific and historical findings into a shared database. The first phase of the project was marked with a two-day conference at the Getty Villa. Conservators, scientists, and curators presented new research on topics such as provenance and collecting, comparisons of works across institutions, and scientific studies of pigments, binders, and supports. The papers and posters from the conference are collected in this publication, which offers the most up-to-date information available about these fascinating remnants of the ancient world.

• Foreword, Timothy Potts
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction, Marie Svoboda, Caroline R. Cartwright, and Susan Walker
• Part One
  • 1. Challenges in the Characterization and Categorization of Binding Media in Mummy Portraits, Ken Sutherland, Rachel C. Sabino, and Federica Pozzi
  • 2. Understanding Wood Choices for Ancient Panel Painting and Mummy Portraits in the APPEAR Project through Scanning Electron Microscopy, Caroline R. Cartwright
  • 3. The Matter of Madder in the Ancient World, Richard Newman and Glenn Alan Gates
  • 4. Green Pigments: Exploring Changes in the Egyptian Color Palette through the Technical Study of Roman-Period Mummy Shrouds, Caroline Roberts
  • 5. Egyptian Blue in Romano-Egyptian Mummy Portraits, Gabrielle Thiboutot
  • 6. Multispectral Imaging Techniques Applied to the Study of Romano‑Egyptian Funerary Portraits at the British Museum, Joanne Dyer and Nicola Newman
  • 7. Evaluating Multiband Reflectance Image Subtraction for the Characterization of Indigo in Romano-Egyptian Funerary Portraits — Lauren Bradley, Jessica Ford, Dawn Kriss, Victoria Schussler, Federica Pozzi, Elena Basso, and Lisa Bruno
  • 8. Invisible Brushstrokes Revealed: Technical Imaging and Research of Romano-Egyptian Mummy Portraits, Evelyn (Eve) Mayberger, Jessica Arista, Marie Svoboda, and Molly Gleeson
  • 9. Framing the Heron Panel: Iconographic and Technical Comparanda — Georgina E. Borromeo, Ingrid A. Neuman, Scott Collins, Catherine Cooper, Derek Merck, and David Murray
  • 10. A Study of the Relative Locations of Facial Features within Mummy Portraits, Jevon Thistlewood, Olivia Dill, Marc S. Walton, and Andrew Shortland
  • 11. From All Sides: The APPEAR Project and Mummy Portrait Provenance, Judith Barr
  • 12. Painted Mummy Portraits in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Kata Endreffy and Árpád M. Nagy
• Part Two
  • 13. Scrutinizing “Sarapon”: Investigating a Mummy Portrait of a Young Man in the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Renée Stein and Lorelei H. Corcoran
  • 14. Defining a Romano-Egyptian Painting Workshop at Tebtunis, Jane L. Williams, Caroline R. Cartwright, and Marc S. Walton
  • 15. Nondestructive Studies of Ancient Pigments on Romano-Egyptian Funerary Portraits of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Bettina Vak, Roberta Iannaccone, and Katharina Uhlir
  • 16. Painted Roman Wood Shields from Dura-Europos, Anne Gunnison, Irma Passeri, Erin Mysak, and Lisa R. Brody
  • 17. Characterization of Binding Media in Romano-Egyptian Funerary Portraits, Joy Mazurek
  • 18. Binding Media and Coatings: Mummy Portraits in the National Museum of Denmark and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Lin Rosa Spaabæk and Joy Mazurek
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• APPEAR Participants
• Contributors

Marie Svoboda is conservator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is coauthor of Herakleides: A Portrait Mummy from Roman Egypt (Getty Publications, 2011).

Caroline Cartwright is senior scientist in the Department of Scientific Research at the British Museum. She has authored over 245 scientific publications.

Jessica Arista was an assistant objects conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 2013–18 and is a professional associate member of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC).

Judith Barr is a curatorial assistant in the Antiquities Department of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where she has been a part of the Antiquities Provenance Project since 2015.

Elena Basso is a research associate in the Department of Scientific Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a scientist for the Network Initiative for Conservation Science (NICS).

Gina Borromeo is curator of ancient art at the RISD Museum and oversees the Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman collections.

Lauren Bradley is associate conservator of paintings at the Brooklyn Museum where she oversees the care and preservation of paintings dating from ancient Egypt through the present day.

Lisa R. Brody is associate curator of ancient art at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Lisa Bruno is Carol Lee Shen Chief Conservator at the Brooklyn Museum.

Scott Collins has served as technical lead of CT and 3D technology services at Rhode Island Hospital since 2007. He is particularly interested in advanced visualization for 3D medical image rendering, which has led to expertise in modeling, surface representations, and AR/VR display technologies.

Catherine Cooper is an adjunct lecturer in anthropology at the University of Arizona and a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) conservation fellow at the Arizona State Museum.

Lorelei H. Corcoran is professor of art history and director of the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the University of Memphis.

Olivia Dill is a PhD student in art history at Northwestern University. She holds degrees in art history and physics from the University of California, Berkeley and aims to use her interdisciplinary background to develop data-acquisition and image-processing techniques relevant to questions in art history and cultural heritage preservation.

Joanne Dyer is a scientist in the Department of Scientific Research at the British Museum, where she specializes in the study of ancient polychromy.

Kata Endreffy is deputy head of the Collection of Classical Antiquities at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

Jessica Ford is assistant paintings conservator at the Brooklyn Museum.

Glenn Gates is a conservation scientist at the Walters Art Museum.

Molly Gleeson is Schwartz Project Conservator at the Penn Museum.

Anne Turner Gunnison is associate conservator of objects at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Roberta Iannaccone holds a fellowship at ICVBC-CNR (Institute for Conservation and Valorization of Cultural Heritage – National Research Council) in Florence, working on the characterization of polychromy on Roman and Etruscan statues and sarcophagi.

Dawn Kriss has held positions at the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. She is now in private practice, specializing in multiband imaging.

Evelyn (Eve) Mayberger is Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for Advanced Training at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Joy Mazurek is an assistant scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute.

Derek Merck is a computer scientist in the Department of Diagnostic Imaging at Rhode Island Hospital. His research programs are primarily concerned with image-guided procedure planning, image informatics, and medical visualization.

David Murray is director of the Environmental Chemistry Facility at Brown University.

Erin Mysak was an associate conservation scientist at the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale University and is now an independent conservation scientist.

Árpád M. Nagy has been head of the Collection of Classical Antiquities at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest since 1993.

Ingrid Neuman is museum conservator in the Painting and Sculpture Department at the RISD Museum.

Nicola (Nicky) Newman worked in conservation at the Historic Royal Palaces before moving to the British Museum, where she specialized in the treatment of decorative surfaces, primarily from Ancient Egypt and the Far East. She left to become freelance in 2017.

Richard Newman is head of scientific research at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Irma Passeri is senior conservator of paintings at Yale University Art Gallery.

Federica Pozzi is associate research scientist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Caroline Roberts is a conservator at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.

Rachel C. Sabino has been associate conservator of objects at the Art Institute of Chicago since 2011.

Victoria Schussler is a project objects conservator at the Brooklyn Museum.

Andrew Shortland is professor of archaeological science and director of Cranfield Forensic Institute at Cranfield University.

Lin Rosa Spaabaek is a private conservator in Denmark. She has restored and studied the collection of mummy portraits at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and has been a consultant on funerary portraits at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Renée Stein is chief conservator at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University where she oversees the treatment, preventive care, and technical analysis of the museum’s diverse collections.

Ken Sutherland is conservation scientist in the Department of Conservation and Science at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Gabrielle Thiboutot is a PhD candidate at Stanford University. She is Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellow at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris.

Jevon Thistlewood is conservator of paintings at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford and an accredited member of the Institute of Conservation (ICON).

Katharina Uhlir has been the scientific assistant at the Conservation Science Department of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna since 2011.

Bettina Vak has been senior conservator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Collection of Antiquities since 1994.

Jane Williams is director of conservation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Susan Walker recently retired as Sackler Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. An emerita fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, she is president of the Society for Libyan Studies and publications chair for the British School at Rome. From January to March 2015 Walker was a Museum Scholar at the Getty Research Center, undertaking new research on the finds from Steane, Northamptonshire, UK, which inspired her contribution to this volume.

Marc Walton is codirector of the Northwestern University / Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS). In 2013, he was an associate scientist conducting scientific research on antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum.