(view the full sized image here)

My apologies for the later post today.

I gave identifying info about this work to Perplexity with the instructions to research it and tell me all the interesting things it could about the work. Here’s what we got:

Names and Origins

The Fayum Mummy Portraits (also known as Faiyum portraits or simply mummy portraits) are perhaps the most startlingly modern-looking artworks from the ancient world. While they were formerly and incorrectly called "Coptic portraits," these masterpieces are generally referred to by their geographic designation, though "Faiyum portraits" is used more as a stylistic description than a strictly geographic one.

What Gazes Back at You

Picture this: A young woman with enormous, penetrating dark eyes stares directly at you from across two millennia, her lips touched with real gold leaf that still gleams today. Beside her, a teenage boy named Eutyches—a freed slave whose story is written in Greek beneath his portrait—looks calmly out with the confidence of someone who knew he would live forever. These aren't just paintings; they're windows into souls that refused to be forgotten.

Each portrait captures a single person, typically showing the head or head and upper chest, viewed frontally—a revolutionary departure from the traditional Egyptian side-profile style. The subjects wear Roman tunics with purple stripes, elaborate jewelry, and fashionable hairstyles of their era, their faces modeled with flowing brushstrokes and subtle blends of light and shadow.

The Fusion That Changed Everything

Here's where the story gets fascinating: these portraits represent one of history's most remarkable cultural mashups. When Rome conquered Egypt in 30 BCE, something magical happened in the cosmopolitan society that emerged. The Greek descendants who had ruled Egypt since Alexander the Great's conquest were now living under Roman administration, but they refused to abandon the ancient Egyptian promise of eternal life.

Instead of choosing sides, they created something entirely new: portraits painted in the sophisticated Greco-Roman style, but designed to be wrapped into Egyptian mummies. It was as if someone today decided to combine a Renaissance masterpiece with a space-age preservation technique—audacious, unprecedented, and absolutely brilliant.

The Magic of Encaustic

The secret to their incredible preservation lies in their revolutionary technique. These artists used encaustic painting—literally meaning "to burn in" in Greek—a method where pigments were mixed with heated beeswax, sometimes combined with egg, resin, and linseed oil. The artist had to work quickly before the wax hardened, creating an almost oil-painting-like effect that could capture the subtlest details of human expression.

The portraits were painted on thin wooden panels—often expensive imported woods like lime, sycamore fig, or cedar—which had to be carefully prepared and sometimes even boiled to make them flexible enough to shape. Some were also painted on linen, and in rare cases, directly onto the mummy wrappings themselves.

Living Portraits for the Afterlife

But here's the most intriguing part of their story: these weren't just death masks. Evidence suggests that many portraits were originally painted while their subjects were still alive, hung in their homes like family photos, and only later repurposed for their mummies when death came calling. Imagine walking into an ancient Egyptian-Greek home and seeing your host's future mummy portrait casually displayed on the wall—a constant reminder of mortality and the promise of eternal life.

The portraits served a deeply spiritual purpose rooted in Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife. The Egyptians believed that every person possessed a ka (life force) and ba (soul) that needed to reunite with the physical body after death. The realistic portraits helped these spiritual elements recognize and return to their earthly vessel, ensuring successful resurrection in the afterlife.

A Window into Roman Egypt

These portraits offer us an unprecedented glimpse into the multicultural society of Roman Egypt between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE. The subjects were primarily well-to-do members of the Greek community who had made Egypt their home for generations, but who still maintained their privileged status under Roman rule. Their portraits reflect this complex identity: Greek names, Roman fashion, and Egyptian burial customs all wrapped into one.

About 900 of these remarkable portraits survive today, scattered across museums worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Brooklyn Museum. Most were discovered in the Fayum Basin region south of Cairo, particularly around Hawara, where British archaeologist Flinders Petrie made his groundbreaking discoveries in the 1880s.

The Artists Behind the Magic

The most poignant aspect of these masterpieces is that we know almost nothing about their creators. These anonymous artists, working in what may have been something like production workshops, created some of the most emotionally powerful portraits in human history. They developed recognizable styles and techniques, possibly using basic facial templates that could be modified for individual clients. Yet despite this systematic approach, each portrait captures something ineffably unique about its subject—that spark of personality that makes us feel we're meeting a real person across the centuries.

The tradition began to fade by the 3rd century CE as Christianity spread throughout Egypt and traditional mummification practices declined. But for roughly 200 years, these artists created a body of work that bridges the ancient and modern worlds, proving that the human desire to be remembered—to truly be seen—transcends time, culture, and death itself.

And that's it!

If you have any details you think Perplexity left out, reply to this email and I'll adjust my prompt to nudge it to include it next time.

This blog was part of my daily newsletter. You can subscribe to it here.

Thanks for reading!

-JP

Current prompt: I want you to create a newsletter post describing the fun and exciting stories around a painting. It should be a newsletter read for leisure and should be an enjoyable read (not just a list of facts) here's what you’re gonna do: Find the name of the following painting in its original language and any alternative names it goes by. Then Research the painting and give me blurb telling me all you can about the artist, the historical context/events it was created in, the style, the materials used, the composition and visual elements, the story/underlying message, what inspired the work/what it meant to the author, and whatever other info you find that helps give a complete understanding of the work. A description of what is depicted (mention subjects) should be the first thing, while the “biography” of the artist should be last. if the work has a lot of meaning behind it, then that is what the meat of the newsletter should be. Besides that you are free to present the information in a concise and captivating way, with the most interesting and novel stuff closest to the top. Order the presentation of information for which pieces have the most compelling and interesting story to tell. At least some of the description should be formatted like a story. [for example: a couple sits on a bench watching the sunset while a man next to them…]. ONLY include information that is for THIS SPECIFIC PAINTING. you will find info on paintings similar to this one but NOT this one. OMMIT INFO ABOUT SUCH PIECES. remember, the goal is to make the most compelling, intriguing, and fun to read newsletter as possible, so keep that above all else.