The Power of the Portrait. Egypt and Rome. Faces of Fayum

The Ara Pacis Museum is hosting The Power of the Portrait. Egypt and Rome. Faces of Fayum, a major exhibition dedicated to the painted faces of Roman Egypt: over 110 works, including wooden panels, shrouds and funerary masks, as well as marble sculptures, plaster casts and ancient jewellery. 

The Fayum portraits are among the most famous images of antiquity and yet among the least frequently seen: fewer than a thousand survive worldwide – wooden panels just a few millimetres thick, painted with hot wax and secured in bandages over the mummy’s face – and they are rarely loaned out. Opportunities to view a substantial collection of them in an exhibition are extremely rare.

For the first time, Egypt is lending almost all of its Fayum paintings – which have never before left Egyptian museums – including the ‘Tondo of the Two Brothers’, the undisputed masterpiece of ancient painting, which has been restored for the occasion at the initiative of the exhibition organisers. Twenty-three works are arriving from the Louvre, including panels and painted shrouds, amongst which are those from Antinoe, which are in an exceptional state of preservation. Alongside this extraordinary group, the exhibition is rounded off by the wealthy Isidora, whose portrait — now at the Getty Museum — is so refined that it has given rise to the conventional name for its anonymous artist, the Master of Isidora; the splendid Eirene from the Landesmuseum Württemberg in Stuttgart, whose name we know because it is inscribed in gold on the back of the panel; the portraits from the Metropolitan Museum and a previously unseen youthful face, having only just emerged from the excavations of an Italian archaeological mission in Egypt.

The exhibition is curated by Claudio Parisi Presicce and Laura Petacco, promoted by Roma Capitale, the Department of Culture and Coordination of Initiatives relating to Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the Capitoline Superintendence for Cultural Heritage, organised by the Capitoline Superintendence and MondoMostre – Civita Mostre e Musei, with the support of Zètema Progetto Cultura.

For further information:

www.arapacis.it