Funerary Portrait of a Young Girl
c. 25–37 CE
- Medium
- encaustic on linden wood
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 39.4 x 17.4 cm (15 1/2 x 6 7/8 in.)
- Culture
- Egypt, Roman Empire, late Tiberian
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
- Credit line
- John L. Severance Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Transforming the spirit—not beautifying the mortal body—may have been the purpose of adding golden lips and jewelry to this painting. Egyptian-style burial customs and arts persisted throughout Greek, Roman, and Byzantine rule over Egypt (305 BCE–641 CE). The woman depicted in this panel lived between cultures. Her or her family’s choice of mummification reflected historical Egyptian practices of creating a physical “duplicate” for the deceased’s soul to rest in, and their decision to color her lips gold here may symbolize how death transformed her into an akh (effective spirit). In contrast, the choice of her clothing and hairstyle showed her embrace of contemporary ideals of Hellenic (Greco-Roman) Egyptian identity.
