ABSTRACT
In Berlin in I 888 a tremendous stir was caused by the first exhibition of the Viennese antique dealer Theodor Graf's collection of newly-excavated Roman mummy portraits from the Fayyum. 'The best of the Graf portraits are of such a convincing truthfulness to life, so full of individuality,' gushed the great classical scholar Ulrich Wilcken in his review of the exhibition of the Graf collection.1 Other scholars went even further in their attempts to bring the individuals depicted in the portraits back to life. 'The portraiture of these paintings will be put in a clearer light when we compare them with the actual heads of the persons,' wrote Flinders Petrie gruesomely in his publication of the I9I I season at Hawara, which yielded 6 5 portraits. He proposed that the skulls of the portrait sitters should be refleshed with wax according to a process perfected by Professor Macalister, then curator of the Archaeology and Anthropology Museum at Cambridge, and added: 'when the heads have been ... restored to their natural fullness by Prof. Macalister's process, it will be possible to compare the portrait with the actual person.'2 Still others imagined themselves in a sort of physical communion with the subjects of the mummy portraits: I have always thought it rather signifiCant that Sigmund Freud purchased one to hang in his consulting room. And the art historian Mary Swindler was much engaged by the splendid portrait of Hermione from Hawara (see Plate 2), whose inscription further identifies her as grammatike, 'educated'. Swindler, writing in I929, promoted her to a 'reader in classics', and added 'the face of Hermione is a joyless one. We do not know whether to sympathise with
the young who came under her eye or regret, rather, that the profession was so uninspiring. In any case, the Hermione type seems to be self-perpetuating in the academic world.'3
