Funerary Panel of a Man

This painting of a young man is a Fayum portrait, a type of funerary portrait commissioned by an elite Greco-Egyptian community in Roman Imperial Egypt. It would have been attached to his mummy.

The community was descended from both native Egyptians and Greek officials and settlers who had come to Egypt during the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Accordingly, their funerary art incorporated both Egyptian — the mummy and mummy mask — and Greco-Roman — the highly individualized style of portraiture — elements. The man’s deep brown eyes are outlined in dark pigment — likely representing the use of kohl, an ancient Egyptian cosmetic.

The artist or artists painted this portrait in encaustic, a mix of pigment and wax, on linen. Most existing Fayum portraits were painted on wood; we can see from the damage to this one that linen is a less durable medium. Learn more about the materials used to create Fayum portraits.

A young man with a slight mustache and warm brown eyes looks at the viewer from this painting. The linen on which his image was rendered was a less popular alternative to wood. Its delicate surface was only workable with brushes, and not the flat metal tools used for details on wooden paintings. The rest of the cartonnage (body case) the man’s image was once part of was painted with ancient Egyptian religious imagery, like that of the young man Artemidorus. The blended decorative forms on the cartonnage show how distinctive Greco-Roman and Egyptian representational systems interacted in Roman-ruled Egypt.