With a new film of the Odyssey in cinemas, we did what we do whenever a subject comes back into the light: we went looking for the best surviving object connected to it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has one that is hard to beat — a fragment of papyrus, written in Egypt somewhere around 285 to 250 BCE, carrying lines of the poem in Greek. It came to New York from the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1909. It is roughly two and a half centuries older than the Roman Empire, and it is one of the oldest physical witnesses to the text that anyone can look at.
We wanted to make a print of it. We are not going to, and the reason is worth writing down, because it is the same reason three formats disappeared from this shop last week.
The arithmetic. The Met's open-access photograph of the fragment is 3791 × 3792 pixels. But the fragment does not fill the frame: measured against the studio background, the papyrus itself occupies about 1119 × 3189 pixels. The object is 19.1 cm high. Our floor is 300 dpi at the final printed size — that is what matte fine art paper can resolve, and we do not interpolate our way past it. Three thousand one hundred and eighty-nine pixels at 300 dpi is 27 centimetres. That is the largest honest print this file can carry.
Twenty-seven centimetres tall, and about nine wide. At original size it would be smaller still: a 19-centimetre object, nine centimetres across, marooned in the middle of even our smallest sheet. There is no enlarged step, because there is no resolution for one. One thin format, or nothing.
The second reason, and it is the one that actually closes the door. A papyrus is not a flat sheet of printed colour like a woodblock print. It is an object, photographed on a grey studio ground, with the ragged edge of the fibre showing all round. To put it on our paper we would have to print the grey field as part of the picture — which would look nothing like the rest of the shop — or cut the fragment out of its background and float it on white, which is retouching. We reproduce; we do not retouch. So that path is closed even if the arithmetic worked.
What we did instead. The eleventh book of the Odyssey, the descent to the dead, was drawn in 1785 by the Swiss engraver Johann Heinrich Lips: Odysseus at the pit with his sword drawn, holding the shades back from the blood, his mother Anticlea reaching towards him. The drawing is 45 × 67 centimetres, it is in Chicago, it is public domain, and the museum's file carries it at original size with room to spare. It is in the shop.
The papyrus stays where it is. If you want to see it, the Met has it online: object 248134, and the photograph is free for anyone to use. Some things are better looked at than hung.
Papyrus fragment with lines from Homer's Odyssey, Greek, Ptolemaic, ca. 285–250 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Egypt Exploration Fund, 1909. Public domain (Open Access).
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