The Lady of the Vatican: The Material and Ritual Lives of Female Portrait Shrouds at Antinoopolis
Wilson, Grace Elisabeth
Wilson, Grace Elisabeth
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Abstract
The sensational discovery of the so-called Lady of the Vatican mummy portrait shroud at Antinoopolis provoked fierce scholarly debate over the deceased woman’s religious identity—and little else. Detached from its mummy and displayed flat like a painting, the now-decontextualized shroud has received only a cursory iconographic analysis. This thesis considers the shroud the way it was intended to be viewed: together with the human remains that it once contained, creating a new divinized form of the deceased. The thesis also examines the specific materials and ritual processes of the shroud’s creation, discussing several notable deviations in form and style from the eleven other female portrait shrouds produced at Antinoopolis between the second and fourth centuries CE. In order to do so, the Lady of the Vatican is situated within the specific historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of Antinoopolis. Long overlooked by art historians in favor of its more well-known Hellenistic sister city Alexandra, Antinoopolis produced the greatest number of extant mummy portrait shrouds, each exhibiting high technical quality. This thesis considers the city as a locus of Late Antique Egyptian artistic production in its own right. Possible display contexts for the Lady of the Vatican and other portraits are discussed as well as their implications for artistic choices. The final chapter of the thesis is an in-depth analysis of the two surviving figural vignettes on the left of the Lady of the Vatican and the significance of their iconographic similarities with the Chapel of Peace at Bagawat and the Ashburnham Pentateuch.
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Master of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Spring 2026.
Date
2026
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Keywords
Mummy portraits, Egyptian portraits, Roman portraits, Roman antiquities
Citation
Wilson, Grace Elisabeth. "The Lady of the Vatican: The Material and Ritual Lives of Female Portrait Shrouds at Antinoopolis". Master's Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2026.