Fayum Portrait of a Boy face swap

Where this one comes from

Late second century, from Roman-period Egypt. The boy wears a plaited lock hanging at one side of an otherwise shaved or cropped head — a very old Egyptian marker of childhood, associated with the god Horus as a child, still in use under Roman rule two thousand years after it first appears. The panel was painted for a funeral, which in a society with this rate of child mortality means it was painted quickly.

What is in the picture

Very large eyes, an unformed chin, a white tunic, and the braid falling over one ear against a plain ochre ground. The painter has not softened the child into a type: the ears stick out, the mouth is slightly uneven, and it reads as a specific boy. What makes these panels strange to look at is that they were made for the inside of a wrapping, to be seen for a day and then hidden for eternity, and they are painted as carefully as if for a wall.

When people use it

For being young and entirely serious about it. It works for anything about a child behaving like an adult, and for the photograph a parent takes that the kid clearly did not agree to.

How your face lands in it

A large frontal face in flat light with a plain background and nothing crossing it, so the mechanics are easy. The proportions are a child’s — wide eyes set low, small jaw — and an adult face placed into them comes out looking odd in a way that some people find funny and others find unsettling. Worth knowing before you choose this one.

Mummy portrait of a boy with a youth lock — Unknown painter, Roman Egypt, Late 2nd century AD. The painting is roughly eighteen hundred years old and in the public domain, and the holding museum published its photograph under the CC0 public domain dedication. Source

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