From material remains we receive few glimpses of the importance of
painting as a portrait medium.Most of the evidence derives from mural
painting, whereas portraits painted on wooden panels or linen have disappeared almost entirely, except in Egypt where preservation conditions
have been exceptionally good. However, portraits painted on wooden
panels were a mode of representation that was probably as significant
as marble or bronze. An abundance of evidence, both inscriptional and
literary, demonstrates that paintings were a significant portrait medium
in all parts of the Empire, including Rome. Dio, for example, first mentions
painted portraits when he explains that in A.D. 45 Claudius found
the public spaces in Rome so overcrowded with portraits that he had
them moved somewhere else.

Epigraphical evidence also reveals that painted portraits in general, some as clipeatae or panels were commonly awarded to deserving citizens. In an inscription from Sardis in Asia Minor, which dates from the Augustan period, a certain Menogenes is honoured with a statue in bronze, one in marble and six portraits painted on gilded shields. Also in Sardis, in the first century B.C., a certain Iollas is honoured with a number of statues in different materials as
well as four painted images.

The so-called Berlin tondo of the Severan imperial family , Pliny the Elder’s reference to a colossal painted portrait of Nero (destroyed by lightning) and the funerary inscription of a certain Aurelius Felicianus who is described as a painter of emperors as well as of men of good repute homines nobiles, show that painting was a medium employed to represent imperial persons. Commissions may have been intended for public display. Alternatively, small, unpretentious works may have been commissioned for domestic use, like the Berlin tondo which was probably found in a private house. Mere scribbles such as those mentioned by Marcus Cornelius Fronto were also to be seen in “entrance halls, windows, in shops, everywhere”.

Painting certainly seems to have been a major medium for portraits
during the whole Roman period but the material evidence suggests concentrations in certain chronological periods as well as significant differences in its use between regions. Grand-scale paintings from different
parts of the Empire depicting scenes that featured historical personalities
or mythological and religious figures, may have been used as cheaper
‘substitutes’ for marble friezes.

Examples of such paintings may be found in the peristyle court of a Severan house in Chartres, or in the synagogue and the temple of Bel at Dura Europos in Syria, dating before A.D. 256.

From Syria there are many other portrait paintings preserved
in houses and tombs, suggesting a strong local preference for
painting. Likewise chronological variations may obtain. Until the quarries
at Luni were excessively exploited during the second half of the first
century B.C., painting (and bronze) must have played a more significant
role as a portrait medium than marble. Painting must also be considered
as an alternative medium during the third and fourth centuries
A.D. when the number of honorific statues and portraits declined, as
did monumental art more generally. Monumental art may have been
replaced by spectacular painted tableaux not unlike those included in
Scipio Africanus’ triumph in 201 B.C. for example, or the modern
phenomenon of a ‘tableau vivant’ – the decoration of public streets and
squares of European cities with depictions of historical events during periods
of crisis or sudden and unexpected events. According to Herodian,
Septimius Severus sent paintings to Rome illustrating his Persian
wars. Descriptions of the paintings sent to Rome by Maximinus Trax recall
the historical reliefs on the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius.
Whether the paintings depicting Severus’ Persian wars were used as
sources for the reliefs on his arch in the Forum Romanum remains an
open question.However, by the mid-Severan period grand historical
marble monuments were no longer commissioned. Likewise, there is a
clear decrease in the production of marble portraits during the third
century A.D. Only half as many emperor portraits are preserved from
ca. 230 to 333 as are extant from the period A.D. 100 to 200. It may be
significant that Philostratus Lemnius (born c. A.D. 191) in the introduction
to his Eikones claims that by exploiting colours, painting can
achieve more than the three-dimensional medium of sculpture.18 Significantly, there is extensive evidence for the use of painted portraits during the fourth century A.D.

When describing marble and bronze Pliny the Elder mentions numerous
famous sculptors of the Greek past but he is almost entirely silent
about those of his own time. When talking about painting, however,
he mentions by name several famous portrait painters who are more or
less his contemporaries. Of an Augustan painter called Arellius, Pliny says
that he would have been very famous if he was not “… always paying
court to any woman he happened to fall in love with, and consequent ly painting goddesses, but in the likeness of his mistresses; and so his
pictures included a number of harlots”. A certain Iaia, a contemporary
of Varro (119–26 BC), worked in Rome as a specialist in painting portraits
of women and she also made a self-portrait by using a mirror.We
hear of “…the most celebrated portrait painters of the same period,
Sopolis and Dionysius, whose pictures fill the galleries.” Portrait sculptors
rarely signed their work and one may wonder whether painters
and their artworks were more esteemed than sculptors. Just like cameos,
for which the names of several carvers are known, painted portraits
were not for ‘everybody’ to see, as they had to be displayed in a sheltered
location protected from the elements, whereas sculpted portraits
were independent of weather conditions and could be displayed anywhere.

By far the best evidence for portrait painting, reminding us of what
may have been lost, comes from Egypt: the so-called mummy portraits,
heads or busts painted either on linen or wooden panels and cartonage
busts inserted into mummy cases . Favoured by a Hellenized
upper class and portraying the patrons with metropolitan Roman
fashion hairstyles, the portrait panels, when provenanced, are almost exclusively found inserted into the Egyptian mummy cases in necropoleis
in the Fayum and other areas of the Nile valley. One of these panels,
reported to have been found in a tomb in Hawara, has a wooden frame
and the rope used in hanging it has also been preserved. The discovery
of this panel and of a tomb in Er-Rubayat in which portrait panels were
displayed on the walls, have contributed to speculation about the original
function of these portraits. One theory is that the panels were
painted and displayed while the subject was alive and later, upon the
death of the subject, cut for insertion into the mummy case. But Barbara
Borg has proposed a series of convincing arguments against this theory.
The most obvious explanation for the function of the mummy portraits
is that they were purposely made for a mummy. A number of the
mummy portrait panels have, however, been cut very roughly into shape
to fit into the mummy. It is not unlikely that they were commissioned
as larger panels including part of the body, and carried in the funeral
procession of the dead before they were cut to fit into the mummy.
Two wooden tondi panels, the so-called Tondo of the Two Brothers,
showing two youths in half-figure with deities alluding to death at their
shoulders, and a tondo depicting a couple as Mars and Venus also come
from tomb contexts. However, one wooden portrait tondo panel, the
only preserved painting representing imperial persons, the Severan family,
is said to have been found in a private house, and therefore attests
to the use of painted panels also outside the funerary context. A list of
temple offerings by women submitted by the priests of several temples at Oxyrhynchos in A.D. 213-217 mentions painted images of Caracalla,
his mother Julia Domna, and his deified father Septimius Severus,
from the temple of Neotera. This list is probably representative of the
type of offerings found in small temples not just in Egypt but across the
Empire.

Outside Egypt, the evidence comes primarily from mural paintings
in tombs and houses. Representations include tondi, busts, half- and fullfigures. The painted portraits often imitate portraits in other more
precious materials such as silver and bronze. Pliny the Elder complained
that painted portraits which showed accurate likenesses had gone out of
fashion and been replaced by bronze shields with silver faces in the
Roman atrium. In Casa dell’Impluvio in Pompeii, for example, images
that seem to imitate painted metal shields are painted at oblique angles
high up on a wall in a kind of ‘plate rack’ consisting of two wooden
beams. Whether these are portraits or whether they are meant to recall
the kind of bronze shield images that Pliny disliked remains uncertain.31
However, the main burial chamber in the so-called ‘Tomb of the three
brothers’ in Palmyra probably decorated between A.D. 160 and 191,
boasts nine painted shield-shaped tondi portraits, which mimic honorific
metal shields. Each tondo is decorated with a male or
female bust, or in one case the bust of a woman and child.

The tondi each have an ornamented yellow-painted frame which may have been meant to imitate gilding; and each is carried by a Victoria. Although the
paintings have faded heavily, old photos leave little doubt that the busts
in the tondi are portraits because the women wear fashion hairstyles
and jewellery characteristic of Palmyran sculpted funerary busts. It is
possible that the tondi imitate the clipeatae imagines, which were associated
with old-fashioned public honours in Rome. The Victoria figure
carrying a shield portrait is evocative of representations of the Roman
emperor. We have already seen how the clipeus format influenced the
funerary art of freedmen in Italian cities from the late first century B.C.
on. A stone sarcophagus found in Panticapeion near Kerch on the Crimea
probably dating from the early second century A.D. shows on the inside
a painted central scene with a portrait painter. He is depicted
seated with a paintbrush or perhaps more likely a metal tool in his
hand and working on a panel with a check board pattern.
An easel next to him displays a blank panel with a wooden frame and
a robe for hanging. While the blank panel is waiting for a commission,
the commissioned works that had already been finished – a square
painted panel in a wooden frame and two shield-shaped paintings each
with a portrait image – hang on the wall. The differently framed portraits
possibly illustrate the choice that was available when a funerary
portrait was commissioned in this remote part of the Roman world.

In murals, in Pompeii, for example, portrait tondi of a more simple form
without the typical shield-shaped frame seem to be suspended with
ribbons on the wall. The back wall of the Tomba della Via Portuense
in Rome is painted with a portrait in a tondo that rests on a profiled
support, thus imitating either a wooden or metal tondo disc.
Full-length statues were also represented in painting. The first century
A.D. tomb of C.Voconius Proculus in Merida in Spain has a rich painted
decoration and shows Voconius Proculus himself in toga as a full-figure
statue mounted on a base. Another painting shows his parents Gaius
Volconius and Caecilia Anus both clad in tunica and mantle mounted
on a shared wide base in a representation indicative of bronze or marble.
It is probable that the painted representations deliberately imitated
or evoked the grandeur of publicly displayed images. Alternatively
(though this is less likely), the painting may have copied a statue of the
same individual set up in public, of which its patron or heirs were proud.
The same phenomenon can also be observed in stucco applied to walls
of tombs and in marble reliefs. In contrast, other representations,
for example those on the linen shrouds, portray the figure in a more
naturalistic manner – in a standing or walking pose without a statue
base.
The painted panels, the literary evidence as well as the full-figure
portrait representations found on linen shrouds from Roman Egypt,
suggest the importance of grand-scale painting as a portrait medium.
Not least, they are suggestive of what might have been lost.

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