THE FAYUM PORTRAITS AND THE DOXIADIS CLAN

THE FAYUM PORTRAITS
AND THE DOXIADIS CLAN
By IRIS LILLYS
This past fall an extraordinary book
was published. London was where it first
saw the light. Then came Paris where it
has been referred to as "Le livre des
livres" and where the Academie des
Beaux Arts honored it with the award
of the year. Last but not least, this past
November, the famous Harry N. Abrams
Publishing House of New York
produced the superb American edition.
One does not have to be an artist or
a lover of painting to rave about this
book. An average degree of culture and
eye for beauty suffice to make one marvel
on this masterpiece. This publication
is not about Greek art in the proper
sense of the word. It is much more, as it
is the influence of Greek art that produced
those famous Fayum portraits.
The writer, Euphrosyne Doxiadis
who had been researching her material
for more than seven years, tells us that
"the glory that used to be Greece had
influenced this part of the world." Of
course, she is referring to Egypt... In the
foreword of the book, Professor Dorothy
J. Thompson of Girton College,
Cambridge, England, agrees:
"In those painted portraits the tradition
of Greece became joined to ancient
Egyptian practices." She is referring to
mummification.
A strictly Egyptian procedure, mummification
gets lost in the depth of time.
Even the great Greek historian Herodotus
mentions it and that takes us back to
the 5th century B.C. But it was only
when Alexander the Great conquered
Egypt for the Greeks and with three
hundred years of Greco-Macedonian
regime by the Ptolemies that the Greek
customs got out of the capital, Alexandria,
and infiltrated the Egyptian traditions.
It went so far as to affect the
traditional procedure of mummification.
The inhabitants, those who were able to
DECEMBER, 1995
Another characteristic Faytini Portrait
Century:
70,000 tons!

afford the fees that embalmers charged,
added a final touch: the painted portrait
of the defund, a facial representation for
the mummy's future life.
"Now", says Dorothy Thompson,
"almost two milleniums later, a present
day Greek artist versed in the tradition
of Byzantine icon-painting has come to
gaze at the portraits. Thus the book took
life...."
Let us hear what the author has to
say about the Fayum portraits.
"Suddenly in the late 1880's scores of
beautiful and mysterious portraits began
to reach a Western Europe and the
United States. They came from Egypt,
12
from a region called Fayoum, a short
distance from Cairo. A few of these portraits
were discovered earlier and others
came to light since at sites outside
Fayum as well, making a total of more
then one thousand to date. Fayum is the
name that has persisted over all others
in archeology and art history describing
them because more have been found
there than anywhere else.
"The Fayum portraits is the most outstanding
body of paintings to have come
to us from the ancient world, remarkable
for their social and psychological
insight and for their quality of art. Andre
Malraux described them as glowing
with a flame of immortal life. Products
of the Greek naturalistic tradition, the
best of them painted directly from life,
they have by some miracle of painting
captured life itself..."
"Yet", continues Euphrosyne, "those
portraits have constantly been neglect-
ed by historians and critics and are practically
unknown to the general public..."
Asked what she thought was the reason
for this misconception, Euphrisyne says
she can think of three reasons:
First -- those portraits are not signed
by any known artist. Even the same Fay-
oum has been objected as not all portraits
were discovered in the Fayum region.
They are what is called "victims of
aninymity."
Secondly-- they are scattered all over
the world, sometimes in different sec-
tions of the same museum: as Greek
portraits of Egyptian mummies which
date from the Greco-Roman period,
they are often found in the Egyptian,
Greco-Roman and Coptic department.
And, Thirdly -- they were initially
dogged by the reputation that they
might be fakes as they had been so overrestored
by their collectors that all
seemed possible.
The author of this book is a painter
in her own right. Born in Athens, she
was lucky enough to have had as her first
teacher, rather her mentor in art, the
famous Yannis Tsarouchis. There is no
doubt that her interest in the Fayum
portraits was kindled by him as he himself
had been greatly influenced by the
Egyptian portraits. Her studies later in
Europe and the U.S.A (Oscar Kokoscha
School of Painting in Austria, The Slade
School of Fine Arts in London, the
Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan
and lately the Wimbledon School
of Art in London), all but developed her
desire to look deeper into what she calls
the first surviving portraiture in history.
Euphrosyne's Doxiadis comes from
a well-known and very respected family
in Greece. Her grand father, Dr. Apostolos
Doxiadis, a pediatrician, was born
in what used to be called Anatoliki
Roumelia, the Greek speaking province
of Bulgaria. The family was well off and
the two sons were sent to Germany to
study medicine. (Actually the grand fa-
GREEK-AMERICAN REVIEW

thers' brother had remained in Germany
where he baceme a university professor
of surgery). Dr. Doxiadis had also
served in Eleftherios Venizelos' government
as Secretary of Health. He had
four sons, all of them gone. Thomas an
internist, held the highest position in his
profession and was also the Court Physician.
Another son, Spiros, a pediatrician
after his father, had also served as
Secretary of Health under the Karamanlis
regime (he is the only Greek who ever
fought, but, alas, unsuccessfully, the disastrous
cigarette smoking addiction in
the second highest smoking country in
the world, Greece). Kirkos, another
Doxiadis brother had studied economics
but had been all his life a charming
dilettante in all phases of cultural life.
The fourth brother, Dinos, was Euphrosyne's
father. He had studied architecture
and engineering. But his switch to
city-planner made him internationally
known. His firm built towns in Saudi
Arabia and several other provinces of
the new world. He even had an office in
Washington D.C. from where his company
directed works in the Midwest.
Also in Athens he created a licensed
school where all branches of artistic
work is taught.
Dino Doxiadis had three daughters.
The eldest, Anthy, with a Ph. D. in children's
psychological disorders, left
Washington where her two children are
persuing their studies to establish in
Athens(with her own funds) a center for
disturbed poor children, the "Perivolaki."
Daughter number two, Calli, is a New
Yorker. She too is a writer who devides
her time between her writing and her
husband's sabbaticals in Madrid where
he teaches when he is not at his chair at
Columbia University. He is a Greek-
American and his name is Edward
Malafakis.
A brother is also part of the Doxiadis
family. His name is Apostolos(if he
lived in the States he would have been
Apostolos Doxiadis the third.) He is in
charge of the Doxiadis Institution in
Athens but besides that his interests
comprise theatre, poetry and all sorts of
artistic expressions.
Frossaki(that was her name when I
met her in her teens) is the youngest of
this very gifted family. Still in her thirties
she has covered lots of ground for
her age. With her first marriage she
moved to London, where she stayed
with her young son, Nikiforos. Her second
marriage produced a daughter
which is growing up showing the lovely
English complexion of her father combined
with the charm and personality of
her maternal grandmother and namesake,
Emma.
Together with the development of her
career, Euphrosynes' private life took finally
a turn for the best. Her husband,
Nikos Mouzelis, a professor at London's
famous School of Economics, besides
being brilliant is an ideal companion to
his wife and an ardent admirer and advocate
of her career.
Knowing the dynamism of Mrs. Euphrosyne
Mouzelis - Doxiadis, it is sure
that her talents will keep on producing
both paintings and books of the caliber
of the "Mysterious Fayum Portraits."
DECEMBER, 1995 13