Jean-Christophe Bailly’s A Silent Apostrophe is a lyrical interdisciplinary study of the Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt. This “truly remarkable essay,” in the words of art critic John Berger, explores the ongoing fascination with these nearly 2000-year-old images and, in so doing, tells an origin story of portraiture as we know it today. Drawing on a wealth of historical materials, Bailly shows how the Fayum portraits, painted during the first three centuries of the Common Era, preserve certain aspects of ancient Egyptian funerary tradition while bringing to full fruition a new form of Greco-Roman mimetic practice. With over sixty beautifully reproduced images, the reader will experience an unforgettable face-to-face encounter with the Fayum mummies.
Although the Fayum portraits are housed in museums throughout the world, their enigma still remains intact. From the realm of death into which they have passed, they gaze at us with eyes wide open, seemingly alive and yet entirely mysterious and other, transported from a long-vanished world. Through Bailly’s artful prose and analysis, this silent population comes to life and into our lives, speaking to us in a series of epiphanies. The history of portraiture–and its connection to death–is here written from an entirely new perspective.
“Before and after A Silent Apostrophe, Jean-Christophe Bailly wrote extensively on art and artists. But this book is special. The luminously inspired style of Bailly’s essays on aesthetics conveys here a constant amazement at how the ‘oldest known portraits of individuals’ (the ‘scattered chorus’ of the Fayum portraits) short-circuit artistic intention—indeed, any kind of willful address to a beholder to come—and yet somehow apostrophize us. They turn away from the narrative networks often born by the sarcophagus or shroud they have been grafted upon, and seem to gaze at us, mutely, from the threshold between life and death where they stand. Responding to their speechless and voiceless apostrophe, Bailly’s writing radiates toward the reader like magnetic waves of wonder.”
— Peter Szendy, David Herlihy University Professor of Comparative Literature and the Humanities, Brown University
