Mummy Portrait of a Boy (Eutyches)

Painted in colored beeswax on a thin wooden panel, this portrait of a boy was bound over the face of his mummy in Roman Egypt, where Greek-descended settlers kept Egyptian burial rites. A Greek inscription names him, usually read as Eutyches, a freedman. The large dark eyes and softly modeled cheeks look startlingly present, the strokes of hot wax still visible. Such Fayum portraits, named for the region south of Cairo, are the most lifelike faces to survive from antiquity and a direct ancestor of the painted icon.