Portrait of a Man Wearing an Ivy Wreath

This young man’s large, liquid eyes, chiseled features, and gold-crowned curls greet the viewer with a startling immediacy. He seems alive, even contemporary. Yet this image is actually a funeral portrait. Called Fayum portraits, after the modern region in Egypt where they were found, they are from the Roman period in the first century CE.

To create the startlingly life-like effect, artists used encaustic, or pigmented wax on wood, to painstakingly shade and tint the faces. Some include gilding, or work with gold leaf, a sign of wealth. This portrait has an unusual amount of gilding in the background and on the wreath on the man’s head, indicating high status.

When European and American scholars first studied these portraits in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the images defied categorization: Were they Egyptian or Greco-Roman? Today, however, art historians view the images as a unique composite genre emerging from contact between these two ancient Mediterranean cultures. Read more about status and syncretism in Greco-Egyptian funerary portraiture.

This portrait belongs to a large group of similar works known as “Fayum portraits,” so-named for the region in northern Egypt in which many have been discovered. To create this man’s likeness, the artist painted a thin piece of wood with encaustic, or pigmented wax, a medium that not only gave the impression of three-dimensionality but also resisted fading and deterioration in the dry climate of Egypt. These highly individualized and lifelike portraits conveyed the wealth and status of the person depicted through clothing, jewelry, and other embellishments, such as the gold wreath of ivy worn by this man.