Il potere del ritratto. Egitto e Roma. I volti del Fayum

Upcoming5 November 2026 – 2 May 2027·€17

Over 110 works, including nearly 50 Fayum mummy portraits lent by Egypt, the Louvre, the Getty and the Met, set against Roman portraiture in marble and plaster.

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On now Opening in November 2026

Preview: written before the show opened

These faces were painted to be laid over the dead: wooden panels a few millimetres thick, slipped between a mummy's bandages. Close to 50 of them come to the Ara Pacis, and Egypt has lent almost all the panels in its own collections, none of which had left the country before.

You start between two worlds: a Ptolemaic funerary mask from the Museo Barracco on one side, Capitoline marble portraits on the other, and the first Fayum faces in between. Five sections follow, from plaster casts taken from the dead under St Peter's, through a room of named faces, to the painted linen shrouds that close the route. Jewellery from Pompeii and Herculaneum sits alongside, so you can match the earrings in the paintings to ones found in the dig.

The show is in the exhibition space at Via di Ripetta 180. An exhibition-only open ticket is €17, plus €1 to book ahead. It is open daily 9.30 to 19.30, last entry an hour before closing.

Look for

The Tondo of the Two Brothers
Two young men painted half-length in hot-wax encaustic, with touches of light in their eyes, freshly restored in Cairo for this show.
Eirene from Stuttgart
Look for her name painted on the panel itself, beside the prayer her family wrote entrusting her soul to Osiris.
The casts from the tomb of the Valerii
Plaster casts from beneath St Peter's that show the whole process, from an impression taken of a dead person's face to the finished marble.
The mummy of the girl Giupra
A child's sarcophagus and mummy from Florence's archaeological museum, a reminder that every portrait here belonged to a real person.
The shrouds of Antinoopolis
Large painted linen shrouds lent by the Louvre, unusually well preserved, which close the route with the last portraits of the tradition.