Fayum mummy portraits in Rome, the Ara Pacis exhibition: ancient Egypt looks you in the eye
Alice PettirossoThe Fayum mummy portraits exhibition in Rome is open at the Ara Pacis Museum from 5 November 2026 to 2 May 2027. Nearly 50 faces of men, women and children who lived in Roman Egypt, painted to go with them into the afterlife. Here is who they were, how they reached us, what not to miss and how to plan your visit.
A gaze from 2,000 years ago
You walk into the room and you feel watched. Dozens of faces stare at you with large, dark, intensely alert eyes. One man has a mole on his nose, and the painter did not hide it. A young woman wears a gold wreath in her hair. They look alive. And they are almost 2,000 years old.
These are the Fayum mummy portraits, and they are now on show in Rome. That does not happen often: fewer than a thousand survive in the whole world, and museums rarely lend them.
What to see at the Fayum portraits exhibition in Rome
The exhibition is called «Il potere del ritratto. Egitto e Roma. I volti del Fayum» (The Power of the Portrait. Egypt and Rome. The Faces of the Fayum) and is curated by Claudio Parisi Presicce and Laura Petacco. There are more than 110 works: painted panels, shrouds, funerary masks, marble portraits, plaster casts and ancient jewellery. At its heart are nearly 50 Fayum portraits, on loan from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the museum in Stuttgart. There is also a face that recently came to light in the excavations of an Italian mission in Egypt, led by the University of Salento.
The route starts in Rome. The first section shows the casts from the tomb of the Valerii, beneath St Peter's: you can see how a cast taken from the face of the dead led to a marble portrait. Then you move to Egypt, where the mask gives way to the painted panel. The most powerful moment is the room of faces: dozens of Fayum portraits next to the sculpted portraits of the Capitoline Museums, with jewellery from Pompeii and Herculaneum. The exhibition closes with the last panels, from the 3rd century, and the large painted shrouds from Antinoe, such as the one of a child, on loan from the Louvre.
Tondo of the Two Brothers, mid-2nd century AD. Cairo, Egyptian Museum (detail)
Among the pieces not to miss is the famous Tondo of the Two Brothers, from Cairo: two young men side by side, painted around the middle of the 2nd century AD and restored in Egypt by an Italian firm together with the museum's conservators.
Buy the Tondo of the Two Brothers print on Trizio Editore
What are the Fayum portraits? Real people, with real names
The first thing to know: they are not invented characters. They are real people who lived in Roman Egypt between the late 1st century BC and the middle of the 3rd century AD.
It was a mixed world. Egypt was a province of Rome, people spoke Greek and prayed to the Egyptian gods. The portrait of Eirene, on loan from Stuttgart, tells this better than any book. She has a Greek name, which means «peace». Her father is called Silvanos, a Latin name. Her mother, Senpnoutis, an Egyptian one. And the inscription entrusts her soul to Osiris-Sokar, lord of Abydos and Egyptian god of the dead. Three cultures in a single line.
Portrait of Eirene, painted between AD 40 and 50. Stuttgart, Landesmuseum Württemberg (detail)
And why are they called «Fayum» portraits? The Fayum (also spelled Faiyum) is a large oasis southwest of Cairo, where a great many of them were found at the end of the 19th century. Today the name is used for all portraits of this kind, including those discovered elsewhere: for example at Antinoe, the city the emperor Hadrian founded in AD 130 in honour of the young Antinous.
Buy the Portrait of Eirene print on Trizio Editore
A face above the bandages
The portrait was painted on a very thin wooden panel. The panel was then slipped between the mummy's bandages, right over the face of the dead person. The body disappeared under the linen; the face did not.
And those faces are faithful. Studies of the mummies have found a strong match between portrait and body: age and sex correspond. That is why it is striking how many of them are young. Most of the portraits show boys, girls, men and women in the prime of life: in antiquity people died young, and here you can see it.
Man with a mole on his nose, painted between AD 130 and 150. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art (detail)
Even the hair tells the truth. The hairstyles closely follow the fashions of the imperial court in Rome, so closely that today they help to date the panels. The young woman with the gold wreath, on loan from the Metropolitan like the man with the mole, wears her hair as it was worn in Hadrian's time.
It was not only a keepsake, though. Having your portrait painted, the museum explains, was a way of asserting your identity, your status and your place in society. A bit like an official photograph, but for eternity.
The secret is beeswax
Why do they look so alive after so many centuries? The secret is called encaustic. Painters mixed their pigments with molten beeswax and applied them hot, with a brush and a small metal spatula. They had to work fast, before the wax cooled.
The result is a painting full of light, reminiscent of oil painting. Wax is an extremely stable material and does not yellow; Egypt's dry climate did the rest. And so these gazes have crossed almost 2,000 years without losing their freshness.
Portrait of Isidora, around AD 100. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum (detail)
The materials tell stories of travel too. Look at Isidora, on loan from the Getty in Los Angeles: her name is written in Greek on her shroud, and the red of that linen is minium, a pigment that came all the way from Spain.
Buy the Portrait of Isidora print on Trizio Editore
Fayum exhibition at the Ara Pacis: opening hours and tickets
The exhibition is open from 5 November 2026 to 2 May 2027, every day from 9.30 am to 7.30 pm, with last admission one hour before closing; on 24 and 31 December it closes at 2 pm, and it is closed on 25 December and 1 May. The museum is on Lungotevere in Augusta, and the exhibition ticket office is at Via di Ripetta 180.
A ticket for the exhibition only costs €17, concessions €15; children under 6 go in free. Visitors who are not resident in Rome and also want to see the Ara Pacis can buy the combined ticket, at €25. There is a €22 family ticket for two adults with children under 18, which can only be booked by phone on 060608 or at the ticket office. Other tickets can also be bought online, on Vivaticket. All up-to-date information is on the official website of the Ara Pacis Museum.
A tip: save some time for the room of faces. That is where Egypt and Rome look each other in the eye.
This season Rome has another exhibition that pairs well with this one: Pontormo at the Scuderie del Quirinale, open until 7 February 2027. The Scuderie are less than half an hour's walk from the Ara Pacis, so you can see both in a single day. There too, portraits look you in the eye: these ones were painted in sixteenth-century Florence.
Frequently asked questions about the Fayum portraits exhibition
How long is the Fayum portraits exhibition on in Rome?
The exhibition is open at the Ara Pacis Museum from 5 November 2026 to 2 May 2027.
Where is the exhibition?
At the Ara Pacis Museum, on Lungotevere in Augusta, in the centre of Rome. The exhibition ticket office is at Via di Ripetta 180.
How much is a ticket?
A ticket for the exhibition only costs €17, concessions €15; children under 6 go in free. The combined ticket with the Ara Pacis, for visitors not resident in Rome, costs €25.
How many Fayum portraits are on display?
Nearly 50, out of more than 110 works on show, with loans from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum, the Getty Museum and the museum in Stuttgart.
One of these faces, in your home
As you leave the Ara Pacis, one of those faces may well stay with you. If you would like to keep it close, we have thought of that.
Trizio Editore reproduces the Fayum portraits on handmade Amalfi paper, a paper that has been made on the Amalfi Coast for centuries. It gives the colours a warm, textured depth, perfect for the glow of beeswax. Every print comes with its own handmade frame.
There are 40 portraits in the collection. Six of them are also in the exhibition: the Tondo of the Two Brothers, Eirene, Isidora, the man with the mole, the young woman with the gold wreath and the shroud of the child from Antinoe. The others come from the Louvre, the Metropolitan, the Getty and other great museums.