Encaustic is a way of painting with hot wax. The painter mixes pigment into melted beeswax, lays the colors down while they are still warm, and then passes a source of heat over the finished picture so that every stroke fuses into a single film. Its most famous examples are the portraits painted for mummies in Roman Egypt, almost two thousand years ago.
The word describes that final step. It comes from the Greek enkaustikos, which means "burned in." The fire does not burn the picture, of course. It melts the surface just enough for the separate marks of the brush to flow together, and that burning in is what makes a wax painting a true encaustic.
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The Greeks made the technique famous. Ancient writers praised painters who worked in wax, and the Roman author Pliny the Elder, who wrote a vast encyclopedia in the first century, gives their names and describes their pictures. Yet the paintings he admired are known today only from what he wrote about them.
The encaustics that can still be seen in museums come from somewhere else. They were painted in Egypt, when it was a province of the Roman Empire, and they were not made to hang on a wall. Each one is a portrait on a thin wooden panel, painted to be wrapped into the bandages of a mummy, over the face of the dead.
Many of them were found by an English archaeologist, Flinders Petrie, in a cemetery at Hawara, from 1888 onward. The young man above is one of them, and when Petrie found him, the portrait still lay over his face.
What You'll Discover
Who first painted with wax.
Why warships carried wax paint.
Faces painted for the dead.
How painters raced the cooling wax.
Why wax suited a painted flag.