A funerary portrait from Roman Egypt will go up for sale next week, featuring a strikingly modern-looking male subject with piercing hazel eyes and graying hair.
The painting is one of 900 or so 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, and some other examples were known earlier, according to Sotheby’s, but much of the research into them is recent and ongoing.
Though…