The big headline from the Fitzwilliam Museum (my local) this week was the discovery of a handprint, 4000 years old, on the bottom of an ancient Egyptian pottery “soul house”, a little model house put into tombs. Presumably the potter picked the thing up while the clay was still wet and left his mark. (It will be going on show in the autumn in the Made in Egypt exhibition at the Fitz.)
It was a reminder for me of how emotionally moving all those “second degree” traces of the people of the past can be. They are usually much more moving than the people (that is, the dead bodies) themselves. Interestingly, there was also a publication this week of a 2500-year-old Siberian ice-mummy, with some extraordinarily intricate tattoos. But it didn’t have the impact on me (or others, it seems) of the handprint. That’s not just because I don’t find tattooing especially interesting (though in this case I was struck by the claim these tattoos would be top of the range in a sophisticated modern tattoo parlour). I think it’s more because of the intriguing fleeting connection between “us” and “them” in the handprint. If dead bodies, in whatever form, are slightly repellent, the imprint of a hand is the glimpse of a trace of a living person.
It’s a bit like the doggy paw prints on Roman tiles. Suddenly you are there with an animal you can no longer see, but whose illicit path across the wet ceramics you can still recreate in your imagination (the dog escaping the leash, the kid getting ticked off for not keeping her eye on it). Or it’s like the appeal of choirboys’ graffiti on medieval choir stalls (cue all our fantasies about bored schoolboys getting their knives out while the priest drones on). Or it’s like the loaves of bread left in the ovens of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which are far more wistful than the skeletons (someone actually put the bread in to bake, but the eruption meant they weren’t there to take it out).
The illicitness, or just the error, or the foolish optimism, is part of the appeal too. It’s as if we’re catching out the people of the past, when they don’t expect us to be looking at them. One of my favourite examples of that is the so-called “Brushstroke of Pheidias”, a trace of a brush of paint just detectable on the East pediment of the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum. It’s on the back of Figure F, one of a pair of seated goddesses. It looks like one of the craftsmen (the name “Pheidias”, the overall designer of the Parthenon, is only a joke) was getting his paint brush ready for whatever coating he was going to put on the sculpture, and just tried it out (as painters do) on the back of a sculpture which was never intended to be seen. He assumed that test stroke would be hidden forever.
Except that we can now see it and we have, as it were, caught him out. It’s one of the things that humanizes the Parthenon for me.
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