ABSTRACT
The small gallery called Arts of Greco-Roman Egypt at the Getty Villa in Malibu is dedicated to Classical period Egypt. The display is positioned in a reimagining of the Villa Dei Papiri at Herculaneum and feels embedded within Roman Egyptomania itself. The gallery emphasizes the intermingling of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art, in addition to religion and culture. The mummy portrait panels displayed there are used to illustrate Greek painting and the encaustic technique, while the mummy of a man named Herakleides is used to illustrate how these mummy portraits were originally used as funerary masks. Arts of Greco-Roman Egypt places Roman mummy portraits firmly within a Greco-Roman artistic context while illustrating the Egyptian funerary practice of mummification. Yet historically, the position of Egyptian antiquities in museums has “occupied uncertain terrain” (Whitehead 2009, 92). The ordering and placing of objects in museums reflects how they are seen by the institution and then perceived by the public: Christopher Whitehead has illustrated how the museum can be viewed as a map around academic disciplines and connecting subject areas, but a map that is not neutral. The travel through space and time that a museum can offer represents a form of “spatialised knowledge” in which cultures are surveyed, laid claim to, and “authority over cultural terrain is sought” (Whitehead 2009, 137).
