The faces of fayoum: When eternity takes on human features

These faces, discovered by chance in the Roman necropolises of Egypt, are far more than funerary relics. They represent one of humanity’s first attempts to capture the soul through the features of the face—a revolution in art that would echo through the centuries, influencing Klimt, Picasso, and even Byzantine icons. But who were these men and women with such piercing gazes? Why did their portraits, painted in a forgotten technique, survive when so many other works of antiquity faded away? And how do these images, born from a unique blend of cultures, still speak to us today?

01Gold and wax: a technique lost in the sands

Picture a workshop bathed in light, somewhere between Memphis and Alexandria, in the 2nd century AD. The air is thick with the acrid scent of melted beeswax, mingled with mineral pigments the painter grinds patiently in stone mortars. Before him, a cedar wood panel, carefully sanded and coated with white gesso, waits to receive the features of the deceased—or perhaps the living, for some of these portraits were painted years before their subjects died.

The technique used, encaustic, was already ancient when the artists of Fayoum adopted it. The Greeks had used it for their statues, the Romans for their frescoes, but no one before them had dared apply it to such intimate portraits. The process was both simple and devilishly complex: pigments mixed with melted beeswax, applied with a brush or spatula to warm wood. The wax hardened instantly, sealing the colors in a material both supple and resilient, capable of defying the centuries.

The results were astonishing. The faces seemed to emerge from the wood’s surface as if by magic, their features shaped by subtle shadows and highlights. The hair, rendered in thick strokes of wax, took on an almost sculptural relief. Jewelry—necklaces, earrings, rings—sparkled thanks to applications of gold leaf, placed with surgical precision. And above all, there were those eyes, painted with such mastery that some 19th-century archaeologists initially mistook them for photographs.

Yet the technique was so demanding that it nearly vanished after the 4th century. Byzantine painters preferred tempera, easier to work with, and the secret of encaustic was lost to the mists of history. It would take until the 20th century and the work of conservators like those at the Louvre or the British Museum to rediscover, beneath layers of dust and oxidized wax, the original splendor of these portraits.

02A crossroads of civilizations: when Rome meets Egypt

If these portraits fascinate us so deeply, it is also because they are the fruit of a unique moment in history—when three great civilizations met and fused in the Nile Valley. By the 1st century AD, Egypt was no longer the kingdom of the pharaohs but a prosperous Roman province, where Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans lived side by side, exchanging gods, customs, and artistic techniques.

Fayoum, that fertile oasis southwest of Cairo, was then a true melting pot. Greek colonists had established thriving cities under the Ptolemies, and the Romans, after their conquest in 30 BC, turned it into an administrative and agricultural hub. The names of the deceased—Hermione, Isidora, Eutyches—betray this diversity: some are Greek, others Egyptian, still others Roman. Their portraits, meanwhile, blend the traditions of these three cultures with disconcerting elegance.

Look at the hairstyles, for example. The women wear Flavian-style curls, those tight rings that framed the face during the reigns of Vespasian and Titus. The men sport short, well-groomed beards in the manner of Hadrian, or close-cropped hair like Roman soldiers. Yet beneath these Roman appearances, distinctly Egyptian details emerge: a necklace adorned with the knot of Isis, a symbol of protection in the afterlife; a lock of hair left long on the side, as tradition dictated for children in Egypt; or those enormous eyes, lined with kohl, reminiscent of pharaonic portraits.

This fusion goes beyond mere details. It lies at the very heart of these portraits’ function. For the Egyptians, mummification was an essential rite to ensure the soul’s survival in the afterlife. The Fayoum portraits replaced traditional funerary masks but added a new dimension: individuality. Where Egyptian masks depicted idealized, almost anonymous faces, these portraits sought to capture the very essence of the person—their wrinkles, expressions, imperfections.

For the Romans, on the other hand, these images belonged to a very different tradition: that of the imagines, the wax masks of ancestors that patrician families displayed in their atriums. But here again, the artists of Fayoum transformed the practice. Instead of depicting heroic or idealized figures, they painted human faces, with their doubts, hopes, and sometimes even a certain melancholy.

03The gaze that spans the centuries

There is something strangely modern about these portraits. Perhaps it is the way they stare directly into your eyes, as if the subject had just set down their brush and was watching you from across the centuries. Or perhaps it is that sense of familiarity, as if you had already glimpsed these faces on a street in Alexandria or on the steps of a temple in Memphis.

Take the Portrait of a Woman with a Gold Necklace, now in the Louvre. Her features are fine, almost delicate, but her gaze is of rare intensity. She wears a purple tunic embroidered with gold thread, her hair styled in tight curls, fashionable in the 2nd century. Yet what strikes most is the way the painter rendered the light on her skin—a golden, almost tangible glow, as if emanating from within the wood. You would think she might speak, that she might tell you her story.

And then there are those details that betray a lifetime in a single glance. The wrinkles around an old man’s eyes, painted with almost cruel precision. The unruly lock of hair on a young boy’s head, contrasting with the solemnity of his expression. The jewelry—those pearls, those emeralds, those gold necklaces—that tell a story of wealth, status, and vanity.

These portraits are not mere images. They are windows onto lives that, without them, would have been forgotten. They speak of ordinary people—merchants, priests, mothers—who lived in a world in flux, between two empires and two eras. And they remind us that, despite the centuries that separate us, some things never change: the desire to leave a mark, the fear of oblivion, and that strange fascination we all have for the faces of others.

04The curse of the sands: when portraits resurface from the past

The story of their rediscovery is nearly as fascinating as that of their creation. Picture the scene: it is 1887, in the Egyptian desert near Hawara. A British archaeologist, Flinders Petrie, is methodically excavating a Roman necropolis in search of papyri and pottery. Suddenly, his workers uncover a mummy whose bandages, instead of bearing a traditional mask, are covered by a painted wooden panel. Intrigued, Petrie has the portrait carefully uncovered. And there, before his eyes, appears the face of a young woman, painted with such mastery that he first suspects a forgery.

The discoveries multiply. Within a few years, Petrie unearths over 140 portraits, each as striking as the last. But their authenticity is immediately questioned. How could paintings so fresh, so vivid, be two thousand years old? Some experts, like art historian Wilhelm von Bode, claim they are fakes, crafted by 19th-century forgers to deceive collectors. Others, like Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, defend their authenticity but struggle to explain how such a complex technique could have survived so long.

It would take advances in chemistry and physics to solve the mystery. In the 1930s, X-ray analyses reveal that the pigments match those of antiquity. The beeswax, meanwhile, had resisted time thanks to the desert’s dry climate. And crucially, Greek and Demotic inscriptions found on some mummies confirm their dating.

Yet despite this evidence, another question remains: why were these portraits forgotten for so long? The answer may lie in Egypt’s own history. After the Roman Empire’s conversion to Christianity in the 4th century, traditional funerary practices fell out of use. The Fayoum portraits, associated with a fading paganism, gradually faded from memory. It would take the Renaissance, and then the 19th century, for the West to rediscover these treasures buried in the sand.

05The invisible legacy: when antiquity inspires modern art

If these portraits still move us today, it is also because they left their mark on art history far beyond Roman Egypt. Their influence, often subtle but profound, can be found in the work of the greatest 19th- and 20th-century artists.

Take Gustav Klimt, for example. His portraits of women, with their golden backgrounds and enigmatic gazes, owe much to the Fayoum aesthetic. The way he plays with light and texture—those gold highlights on dresses, those almost floating faces—strangely echoes the techniques of the Egyptian-Roman painters. The same goes for Amedeo Modigliani, whose elongated faces and almond-shaped eyes seem directly inspired by these ancient portraits.

But perhaps it is in Pablo Picasso that the influence is most striking. In the 1900s, during his Blue Period, he became fascinated with Egyptian art and the Fayoum portraits. Their traces appear in works like Woman with Pears (1909), where the model’s face, with its enormous eyes and melancholic expression, irresistibly evokes the funerary portraits of Egypt. Later, in the 1920s, Picasso would draw on these faces again for his Cubist figures, as if those two thousand years of history had been but a detour to return to a kind of primal truth.

Even contemporary art has not escaped their allure. Artists like Gerhard Richter and Marlene Dumas have drawn from this tradition to create portraits that, like those of Fayoum, seek to capture the essence of a being rather than mere appearance. And what of contemporary photographers, who, consciously or not, adopt that frontal composition, that direct gaze, that sense of immediate presence?

06The ghosts of Fayoum: what these portraits tell us about ourselves

At heart, what makes these portraits so moving is what they reveal about our own relationship with death and memory. In a society like ours, obsessed with image and posterity, they remind us that the desire to leave a trace is as old as humanity itself.

Look at these faces. Some smile, others seem sad, still others wear a neutral, almost indifferent expression. But all share one thing: they were painted to endure. So that, two thousand years later, someone, somewhere, might still look at them and think: This person existed. They loved, suffered, hoped, just like me.

And perhaps that is the greatest mystery of the Fayoum portraits. They are not just works of art. They are messages, sent across time by people who did not know we would one day see them. Messages that tell us that, despite the passing centuries, despite the fall of empires, something human persists—that spark of life the artists captured in wax and pigment.

So the next time you encounter one of these gazes in a museum, take a moment to stop. These eyes have been watching you for two thousand years. They have seen empires rise and fall. They have crossed deserts, wars, revolutions. And today, they wait for you, as if they knew you would come. As if they had something to say.