Fayum Portrait of a Woman face swap

Where this one comes from

This was painted in Egypt under Roman rule, somewhere around the middle of the second century, in hot coloured beeswax on a thin wooden board. It was made to be wrapped into the mummy bandages over the face of the dead person it depicts, and it stayed there until the nineteenth century. It is in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and it is roughly eighteen hundred years old.

What is in the picture

Large dark eyes set high in a narrow face, a gold necklace, gold hoops at the ears, and the wax laid on in short strokes that still catch the light at an angle after eighteen centuries. The panel is damaged, and the damage is part of what you are looking at. These are the oldest painted portraits that survive in the European tradition — not idealised heads on coins or temple walls, but individual people, painted from life or close to it, by ordinary craftsmen in a provincial town.

When people use it

For the very long view. It suits anything about time, endurance or being remembered, and it is the one picture here where the format itself is the joke: the oldest portrait format on earth, used for a selfie.

How your face lands in it

The face fills far more of this frame than of any other template here, which makes it the most literal swap on the site: there is very little picture around your face to soften the transition. The encaustic surface is rough and cracked and stays that way, so what comes back looks aged rather than smooth. Use a straight-on photograph; the original is almost perfectly frontal.

Mummy Portrait of a Woman — Unknown, Roman Egypt, c. 150. The panel was painted in the second century by an unknown artist and is in the public domain worldwide; the Walters Art Museum publishes its photograph of the object as public domain. Source

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