ROME: An elegant woman gazes out from her portrait with expressive eyes, a gilded wreath worn in her hair and a gentle, questioning look on her face.
She is one of the 2,000-year-old “Faces of Fayum”, startlingly realistic funerary — or mummy — portraits painted after Egypt became part of the Roman empire.
The fragile portraits dating from the first to third centuries AD — painted on thin wooden panels and designed to be placed over the face of mummies — will go on display in Rome in what organisers hail as a “milestone” collaboration between Italy and Egypt.
“Egypt and Rome, the Faces of Fayum”, opening on Wednesday at Rome’s Ara Pacis museum, also includes mummies, masks, shrouds, jewellery, marble busts and statuary. The majority of the artefacts come from Egypt, with some allowed to leave the country for the first time.
Such is the case of the “Tondo of the Two Brothers” from Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, a freshly restored double portrait from the time of Emperor Hadrian that depicts two curly-haired young men, possibly brothers, with soulful eyes.
Rome’s top official for cultural heritage, Claudio Parisi Presicce, called the work an “absolute masterpiece, perhaps the most important pictorial work to have survived from antiquity”. “These are simple wooden panels, often just a few millimetres thick, made of wood… and they were used to depict, through extremely naturalistic painting, the faces of the individuals who were being buried,” Parisi Presicce told a press conference on Monday.
Published in Dawn, November 4th, 2026
