A funerary portrait from Roman Egypt will go up for sale next week, featuring a strikingly modern-looking male subject with piercing hazel eyes and graying hair.
The painting is one of 900 or so known as the Fayum mummy portraits, created during the 1st and 3rd century AD and placed on the deceased’s mummified bodies like a mask.
Archaeologists found dozens of them in the late 19th century at the Hawara excavation site in Egypt’s Fayum region, and some other examples were known earlier, according to Sotheby’s, but much of the research into them is recent and ongoing.
Though naturalistic and individualized portraits have often been celebrated as a triumph of early Italian masters, this portrait was painted some 1,200 years earlier, in the 1st century AD. Together, the works represent some of the earliest examples of realistic portrait painting still in existence today.
Painted in encaustic using hot beeswax and pigment on a wooden panel, the piece will be a highlight during Sotheby’s Masters Week sales in New York. It could sell for $350,000, according to high estimates, for its skill in rendering both likeness and emotion, from the wrinkles in his skin to his self-assured air.
