Rome, the painted faces of Fayum at the Ara Pacis Museum

From November 5 the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome hosts “The Power of Portraiture. Egypt and Rome. The Faces of Fayum”, an exhibition that will remain open until May 2, 2027. Over 110 works have been brought together to tell one of the most surprising chapters in ancient art: the painted funerary portraits from Roman-era Egypt, found in the Fayum region and, over the centuries, having become a bridge between two civilizations that overlapped without ever fully merging.

Among the pieces on display is a painted wooden panel depicting a boy, discovered in Egypt by the archaeological mission of the University of Salento, directed by Paola Davoli. The find, never before shown to the public, thus joins a display that compares the Hellenistic-Roman pictorial tradition with Egyptian funerary practices: faces painted on wooden panels or on canvas were inserted into mummy bandages, in place of traditional masks, at a time when Egypt was a province of the Roman empire.

These portraits occupy a particular position in art history: they are among the few surviving pictorial testimonies from the ancient world made with the encaustic technique, colors mixed with wax that Egypt’s dry climate preserved for nearly two thousand years. They show individual faces, with realistic features and details of hairstyles and jewelry that have allowed scholars to date them with a certain precision, following the evolution of Roman fashion.

The exhibition stems from a collaboration intertwining museum institutions and university excavation missions, a model that in recent years has led several Italian universities to share with the public discoveries otherwise destined to remain confined to specialist publications. The Salento panel, in this sense, is not merely an additional find but proof that fieldwork continues to produce new material even in an excavation area studied for decades.

It should be noted that, at present, the news comes from a single source (Lecce Sette, which draws on information from the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali); no independent confirmation is available regarding the details of the discovery or the terms of the panel’s loan to the Rome exhibition.

The Ara Pacis exhibition is part of a trend that, in Rome, in these weeks, sees other museum institutions dedicating space to the archaeology of the ancient world, a sign of public interest that the capital’s museums continue to nurture with long-running exhibitions, designed to remain open for months rather than weeks.