ROMAN PERIOD, CIRCA LATE 2ND CENTURY A.D.

Much scholarship has been devoted to the study of Fayum mummy portraits, the name given to a group of naturalistically painted portraits on wooden boards attached to mummies found prominently in the Fayum area of Egypt dating from Roman period, roughly the mid 1st century A.D. to the mid 3rd century A.D. A debate arises amongst scholars on how best to culturally classify these images. While dating to the Roman period, they are found in Egypt, and painted in the Greek naturalistic tradition. Despite the difficulty in classification, there is a universal appeal in these hauntingly lifelike portraits. According to E. Doxiadis (p. 12 in The Mysterious Fayum Portraits, Faces from Ancient Egypt) “their faces have, by some miracle of painting, captured life itself. The viewer becomes involved in direct communion with the person portrayed, who is as if in limbo, in a twilight zone between life and death." While the olive skin tone, doe-like long-lashed eyes and curly dark hair in this example are characteristic of the genre, this young man still remains very much an individual, and the viewer is thus forced consider the particular circumstances of both his life and death, thus illustrating the “direct communion” Doxiadis describes.