Encaustic is a way of painting with hot wax. The painter stirs pigment into melted beeswax and lays the colors down while they are still warm.
Then a source of heat passes over the finished picture, so that every stroke fuses into a single film. The best-known examples are portraits painted for mummies in Roman Egypt, almost two thousand years ago.
The name points to that last step. It comes from the Greek enkaustikos, "burned in." The fire does not burn the picture. It softens the surface just enough for the separate brush marks to flow together, and strictly speaking only a wax painting heated this way is called an encaustic.
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Long before Egypt, the Greeks had made the technique famous. Ancient writers praised painters who worked in wax, and the Roman author Pliny the Elder, who wrote a huge encyclopedia in the first century, gives their names and describes their pictures. Yet those pictures are known today only from his text.
The encaustics that can still be seen come from Egypt, then a province of the Roman Empire. They were never meant for a wall. Each is a portrait on a thin panel, made to be wrapped into the bandages of a mummy, over the face of the dead.
Many were dug up by the English archaeologist Flinders Petrie in an ancient cemetery at Hawara, in the Fayum, a fertile region west of the Nile. Panels of this kind are called Fayum portraits, and the youth on the mummy at the top of this page is one of them.
Pausias of Sicyon and his black ox
Those panels came late. To find where encaustic began, one has to go back to Greece, and there nobody knows who invented it…
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