Portrait of a Man Wearing a Laurel Wreath

Ancient Egyptian · Roman Period, early to mid–2nd century

Medium

Lime (linden) wood, beeswax, pigments, gold, textile, and natural resin

Original size

41.9 × 24.1 × 0.2 cm (16 1/2 × 9 1/2 × 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Medieval

This Fayum mummy portrait arrests the eye with its unflinching gaze — a face that feels present, almost alive, despite being nearly two thousand years old. Created during Roman rule of Egypt, it belongs to a tradition that fused Greek portraiture, Roman social ambition, and ancient Egyptian funerary belief into something entirely its own. The artist worked in encaustic — pigments suspended in heated beeswax — a technique that gave these panels their extraordinary warmth and depth. Gold leaf and natural resin were worked into the surface alongside textile elements, producing a richness that no flat reproduction fully conveys. The laurel wreath crowning the subject signals Roman civic status, a deliberate signal of his place in the colonial hierarchy. Fayum portraits are among the oldest surviving panel paintings in the Western tradition, and they remain startling for how directly they communicate across millennia — these were not ceremonial effigies but recognisable individuals, meant to preserve a specific face. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates this intimacy into a new medium with care, capturing the warm modelling of the skin tones, the weight of the wreath, and the quiet authority of a gaze that has outlasted everything else about its subject.