Mummy with an Inserted Panel Portrait of a Youth

This mummy from Roman Imperial Egypt includes a panel portrait of a young man inserted over the face, likely depicting the deceased.

For most of Ancient Egyptian history, mummy masks were idealized human images. During the Greek and Roman periods, masks became more individualized. Fayum portraits, painted on wood and sometimes cartonnage, served as masks for the mummies of elite Greco-Egyptians.

It is rare to encounter a portrait, like this, in museum collections that is still affixed to a mummy. Unscrupulous 19th and 20th century European collectors often separated the portraits from their tombs with minimal documentation.

Fayum portraits demonstrate the ethnic diversity of Roman Egypt. Yet in the 1940s, the Nazis used Fayum portraits, including this portrait, as part of racist and antisemitic pseudoscientific “studies” creating hierarchies of race and ethnicity.