Noblewoman
Description
Object Label: Roman Period mummy portraits were painted on wooden panels that were slipped into the mummy wrappings over the face of the deceased. Often, as here, the artists used melted wax as a medium, building up thick layers of pigment and highlighting the facial features with touches of white. Although painted in the naturalistic tradition of the Greco-Roman world, these images are idealized representations of the deceased, and they were used in a traditional Egyptian funerary context. This woman's dress, hairstyle, and jewelry show the influence of fashions at the Roman imperial court and reflect a desire to be understood as Romanized. However, there is no way to know whether her heritage was Egyptian, Mediterranean, or mixed. Caption: Noblewoman, ca. 150 C.E.. Encaustic on wood, 17 5/16 x 11 5/16 x 1/8 in. (44 x 28.7 x 0.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Ernest Erickson Foundation, Inc., 86.226.18.
AI image analysis GPT-4o-2024-08-06
Machine-generated from the object's image on May 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.
A painted portrait of a woman on wood.
This painted portrait features a woman with short hair wearing earrings and a white garment. The style is characteristic of Roman-period Fayum mummy portraits, with realistic detailing and the use of encaustic or tempera on wood. The background is plain, emphasizing the figure's features.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 86.226.18 tier-2
- BKM-Object 4266 tier-2
About this record's data
- From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art.
- AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
- Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
- Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.