Portrait of a man with a mole on his nose

A dark-eyed man stares intently at the viewer in this Greco-Egyptian funerary portrait, meant to be tied to the head of the man’s mummy.

The artists who created this Fayum portrait, named after Egypt’s modern-day Faiyum governorate where many were found, used several techniques to create a lifelike impression. The artist or artists painted the subject’s portrait in encaustic, or layers of pigmented wax, creating the fresh, almost dewey texture of his skin. The artist included individual details, such as this sitters’ mole, to individualize the image — thus symbolically preserving the sitters’ uniqueness for eternity.

While artists included many individualized details, researchers from the APPEAR project have also found that subjects’ facial features tended to be spaced at regular intervals along ten horizontal lines. Mathematical rules for depicting the human form were common in both Egyptian and Roman art.