2,000-Year-Old Mummy Portrait Predates Renaissance Realism by 1,200 Years

A funerary portrait from Roman Egypt, featuring a strikingly modern-looking male subject with piercing hazel eyes and greying hair, has just been sold for more than double its high estimate by Sotheby’s in New York.

The painting, which achieved just under $900,000, is one of roughly 900 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 - but much of the research into them is recent and ongoing, says CNN.

Apart from being extraordinarily well preserved, these naturalistic portraits precede the early Italian masters (oft said to be the first to produce such realistic images) by 1,200 years. Having said that, an upcoming exhibition in London intends to try to persuade us that Flemish master Jan van Eyck’s "were the first faces that were genuinely lifelike” and changed the course of art history.

Evaluating the mummy portrait, painted in encaustic using hot beeswax and pigment on a wooden panel, experts noted the artist’s skill in rendering both likeness and emotion, from the wrinkles in his skin to his self-assured air. Though they were painted and entombed in Egypt, the subjects could be Romans, whose nobility could afford both mummification and portrait commissions.

And, in this particular example, the nose could easily suggest that the man is Roman; the substantial bridge being a feature of the Italian race still today.