The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 19, 2025

Portrait in encaustic, pigment mixed with beeswax, on linen of the head of a man with medium skin tone, looking at us but turned slightly left. He has brown eyes, a faint mustache, and cropped wavy, black hair. Thick, streaking strokes add highlights, particularly on his right cheekbone and brow. Roughly rectangular, the linen is missing a large fragment on our left, most of the man's ear gone with it. The edges fray slightly.

Funerary Panel of a Man

about 138–92 CE

Antonine-era Roman Empire , unknown painter

(Egypt)
encaustic on linen
Overall: 24.8 x 19 cm (9 3/4 x 7 1/2 in.)
John L. Severance Fund 1971.135
Location: 107 Egyptian

Description

A young man with a slight mustache and warm brown eyes looks at the viewer from this painting. The linen on which his image was rendered was a less popular alternative to wood. Its delicate surface was only workable with brushes, and not the flat metal tools used for details on wooden paintings. The rest of the cartonnage (body case) the man’s image was once part of was painted with ancient Egyptian religious imagery, like that of the young man Artemidorus. The blended decorative forms on the cartonnage show how distinctive Greco-Roman and Egyptian representational systems interacted in Roman-ruled Egypt.
  • Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1971." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 59, no. 1 (1972). Referenced pp.40, No. 2, www.jstor.org
    Cooney, John D. “Portraits from Roman Egypt.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 59, no. 2 (February 1972): 51–55. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 52-53, fig. 3 www.jstor.org
    Parlasca, Klaus. Ritratti di mummie. Roma: Erma di Bretschneider, 1977. pp, 33. no. 265, pl. 64. fig. 1
    Berman, Lawrence M., and Kenneth J. Bohač. Catalogue of Egyptian Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999 Reproduced: p. 507; Mentioned: p. 507-8
  • Africa & Byzantium. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (co-organizer) (April 14-July 21, 2024).
    CMA 1972, no. 2
    Year in Review: 1971. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (December 28, 1971-February 6, 1972).
  • {{cite web|title=Funerary Panel of a Man|url=false|author=|year=about 138–92 CE|access-date=19 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1971.135