For a recent entry in the Substack Embodied Meanings, Donald Brackett discusses A Silent Apostrophe: The Fayum Portraits by Jean-Christophe Bailly (tr. Samuel Martin), alongside fellow Zone author, Tom Hare’s Out of Character. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“Bailly’s compelling study of painted death masks which accompany the mummified bodies of loved ones provides a somewhat spooky revelation of how attached we are to identifying and memorializing those who have left us. Sometimes this is done under the auspices of giving them an identity in a world to come and other times simply for the living to remember what they meant to us. In his A Silent Apostrophe he acquaints us with something truly exotic: a lyrical interdisciplinary study of the Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt which covers their unsettling yet beautiful 2000 year history and while doing so he simultaneously informs us (as art historian John Berger has observed) of an origin story of portraiture as we know it today. These quite literally haunting facial images, painted during the first three centuries of our Common Era, manage to preserve to some extent many aspects of ancient Egyptian funerary traditions while also bringing to light a brand new form of Greco-Roman mimetic practice, one that eventually, as the reader discovers, evolved into the classical and Renaissance art of realistic likeness in art. Through the author’s insightful text, which accompanies some sixty beautifully reproduced portrait images, he brings us into direct contact with not only the faces of the depicted subjects but also with the energies of a long-vanished world. The history of portraiture, and its deep archetypal connection to death, or rather to the aspects of mortality which has long informed the everlasting vanitas theme (life is short, art is long) via what Bailly poetically calls the silent apostrophe, is revealed to be a human subject matter still vitally alive in the annals of both modern and postmodern artful expressions.”