At the Ara Pacis, the Fayum faces arrive from Egypt for the first time

The Museo dell’Ara Pacis in Rome is displaying over 110 works dedicated to the theme of the human face in the ancient Mediterranean: panels, shrouds, funerary masks, marbles, plaster casts and ancient goldwork make up a journey that crosses different cultures and techniques around a single thread, the representation of the human face through the centuries of Mediterranean antiquity.

The heart of the exhibition consists of nearly 50 Fayum portraits, the wooden panels painted in tempera or encaustic that take their name from the Egyptian region where most of them were found. These are rare works: fewer than a thousand examples survive worldwide, which makes the concentration of nearly fifty pieces in a single exhibition significant in itself for scholars of this particular ancient pictorial tradition.

What makes the exhibition unprecedented, however, is above all the origin of the loans. For the first time, Egypt is granting almost all of the panels held in its national collections, works that had never before left the country. Among the pieces that have arrived in Rome is the Tondo of the Two Brothers, from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, one of the world’s most important museum institutions for ancient Egyptian art.

The loan of these panels, never granted before, thus marks a precedent in relations between Italian and Egyptian museum institutions on the front of archaeological heritage. The exhibition at the Ara Pacis thus becomes an opportunity to see reunited, outside their usual conservation context, works that normally remain separated between the Cairo collections and those scattered across museums in the rest of the world.

The exhibition itinerary, placing the Fayum portraits alongside shrouds, funerary masks and goldwork of different geographical origin, also allows a comparison of techniques and styles far removed from one another but united by the same purpose: to fix forever the face of those who are no longer here, in a dialogue between Egypt, Greece and Rome that spans centuries of Mediterranean history.