Egyptian mummy portraits show antiquity's piercing gaze in new Rome show

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 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 Monday.

Rooted in the tradition of Hellenistic painting, the portraits placed over the head of the mummy and secured into its wrappings come from a relatively brief period between the first and third centuries AD, after Egypt became a province of Rome. In a fusion of two great civilisations -- Egyptian and Roman -- the men, women and children portrayed often bear Egyptian features, but wear Roman dress.

Their faces are vivid, and haunting, whether bearing signs of greying hair and wrinkles, or the long eyelashes and chubby cheeks of a child. "These people are not dead," Italian figurative painter Amedeo Modigliani once said of the Fayum portraits. "They are more alive than those who gaze upon them."

This photograph shows a view of a cartonage mummy covered with a portrait, during a press preview for the exhibition "Egypt and Rome: The Faces of the Faiyum" dedicated to the painted portraits of Roman Egypt at the Ara Pacis Museum in central Rome on Monday. AFP

Works from the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Landesmuseum Württemberg and other international museums round out the exhibit.

A fertile area of Egypt on the edge of the desert, Fayum's arid climate helped preserve the delicate painted wood, textiles and papyrus on display in the exhibition. One work, on loan from the Louvre, is a spectacular, near-pristine linen shroud depicting a man standing between the mummy he will become and Anubis, the jackal-headed god who helped usher the dead into the Afterlife.

Some of the female portraits are adorned in sumptuous jewellery, such as that of the woman "Isidora" from the first century AD, whose three-tiered gold necklace adorned with precious stones, pearl earrings and elaborately curled hairdo project her status.

Parisi Presicce said that "countless questions" remain about the compelling portraits. "Were they made earlier and kept until the moment of death? Were they painted at the time the deceased was buried? Were they panels that were hung in homes, in residences?" he asked. A nail found at the top of one of the portraits makes this theory plausible, he said.

Hisham El-Leithy, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the images from so long ago have an uncanny power to move us. "They are people like us, we look at them, they look back at you across 2,000 years," he said. "That is the power of the portrait." The exhibition runs until May 2.

Agence France-Presse