ABSTRACT
With but a few exceptions, Egyptian mummy portraits are the only surviving examples of antique portrait painting, and they are accordingly of great value. Virtually all Graeco-Roman panel painting has been lost because it was done on wood, a highly impermanent material. The art historians are placed in a paradoxical position: the ancient writers provide us with an astonishingly complete overview of the development of Greek painting and the lives and works of the major artists, yet not a single panel mentioned survives in the original. Greek painters were traditionally employed in connection with the cult of the dead and with the production of votive images and decor in temples and shrines. In addition they received over the course of the fifth and fourth centuries Bc a growing number of commissions for works of a political nature, leading to an expansion of the repertoire of pictorial subjects previously dominated by the world of gods and heroes.
