Helena of Egypt

Biography

Her entire biography fits into one paragraph of the “Bibliotheca” of Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, where he summarises a work by Ptolemy Chennus. Among the women named Helen a painter is listed too: the daughter of Timon the Egyptian, she painted the Battle of Issus at the height of her powers, and the picture was displayed in the Temple of Peace under Vespasian.

That is all that is known.

Everything else is deduced from those lines. The Battle of Issus, in Cilicia in southern Asia Minor, where Alexander defeated Darius III, took place in 333 BC; in one translation Helena painted it “about the time of its occurrence”, whence the dating to around 330 BC and the supposition that she worked in Alexandria, a contemporary of Alexander and his successors. Her teacher, it seems, was her father: Timon was a painter too. Vespasian built the Temple of Peace in the Roman forum four hundred years after the battle, so the picture, if it existed, outlived both the Ptolemies and the Roman seizure of Egypt. The value of the testimony itself is disputed: Ptolemy Chennus is known as a spinner of tall tales, and in his text it is hard to separate information from invention.

The arguments began because of Pompeii. In the House of the Faun, during the excavations of the nineteenth century, a floor mosaic was found showing the battle of Alexander and Darius; it is now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. Who laid it is not known. The mosaic is usually taken to be a copy of a painting by Philoxenus of Eretria, but some have proposed Helena's work as the original. Historians of ancient art objected: Herbert Marwitz wrote that the discussion had no foundation whatever, and Bernard Andreae considers the painter herself a fiction. The argument against is clear to me as well: not a single other painting or mosaic attributed to a woman is known from this period. It seems to me the dispute cannot be settled until at least one more mention turns up.

In modern times her name returned to the reference books: in 1874 Adolphe Siret included her in his “Dictionary of Painters of All Schools”, and in 1912 an entry on her appeared in Pauly's encyclopaedia. In 1979 Judy Chicago included the name of Helena of Egypt in “The Dinner Party”: it is written on one of the tiles of the Heritage Floor, beside the place setting for Sappho.