Family Portraits

Ristvet discusses family portraits from Palmyra, Syria to Philadelphia PA. By the 19th century, a specific type of artwork, the funerary portrait, came to represent Palmyra in museums across Europe and the US. Most of these portraits are busts of a man or woman, carved partly in the round, often ins...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inExpedition Vol. 64; no. 3; p. 67
Main Author Ristvet, Lauren
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania, University Museum 01.12.2023
Subjects
Art galleries & museums
Portraits
Projects
Tombs
United States > US
Palmyra Syria
Philadelphia Pennsylvania
Syria
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Summary:Ristvet discusses family portraits from Palmyra, Syria to Philadelphia PA. By the 19th century, a specific type of artwork, the funerary portrait, came to represent Palmyra in museums across Europe and the US. Most of these portraits are busts of a man or woman, carved partly in the round, often inscribed with the subject's name and patronymic in Palmyrene Aramaic. Funerary sculptures from Palmyra collected by Charles Howard Colket (later a member of the Penn Museum's Board of Managers) were some of the first antiquities that the University of Pennsylvania acquired. They were displayed in College Hall in 1889, the first exhibition of reliefs from Palmyra in the US. The Palmyrene tombs also have many unique elements. For one thing, the sheer number of funerary portraits is unknown elsewhere. The Palmyra Portrait Project, which was begun in 2012, has recorded more than 3,000 individual portraits; only Rome has produced more.
ISSN:0014-4738