Your photo as a Fayum mummy portrait
A face in hot wax on a thin wooden panel, in the manner of Roman Egypt around AD 150. Erafy paints a new panel from your photo.
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Nobody in the examples is a real person — the before photos are invented faces. These are our best results, not average ones. Sometimes AI can't handle it and modifies your face. All we can offer is a try.
What a Fayum mummy portrait was
In Roman Egypt, a portrait was painted on a thin panel of hardwood and bound into the linen wrappings over the face, so that the wrapped body seemed to look out through a window. Several hundred survive, most from the Fayum oasis, which gave them their name.
Most were painted in encaustic: pigment ground into hot beeswax, laid on thick with a brush or a heated spatula. The wax set as it cooled, so each stroke stayed where it landed as a ridge. The sitter is shown head and shoulders, facing out, lit from one side, on a plain grey or gold ground, and the eyes are larger than life.
Erafy makes a new panel of this kind from your photo: short ridged strokes in earth colours, green earth in the shadows, flecks of gold in the hair, the mouth closed and the look grave. The board has aged, with a long crack down the grain. A painted portrait can hold the set of a face, its brows, eyes and hair colour, though how much of yours comes through varies from one go to the next.
With Situation on, the scene is the oasis: a potter's wheel, a fruit stall under an awning, a wedding feast. The other crafts before photography are listed with their dates.
More pictures
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Writing by lamplight -
A couple -
A guinea pig as a person
Other crafts: Panel, silk and thread
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Tang court paintingAD 750 -
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Questions
Were Fayum portraits painted from life?
Scholars still argue about it. The hair, beards and jewellery follow Roman fashion closely enough that a panel can be dated to within a couple of decades, but whether the painter worked from the living sitter is not settled.
What is encaustic?
Painting with pigment in hot beeswax. The wax is kept molten, brushed or spread with a heated metal tool, and stiffens as soon as it leaves the heat, so the strokes stand as ridges. Some Fayum panels were painted in tempera instead, which is thinner, chalkier and more evenly graded.
What would I look like as a Fayum mummy portrait?
Erafy makes a new picture from your photo in the style of the year you pick, so how much it resembles you varies from one go to the next. It varies most in the black-and-white years and in the crafts before 1900, where faces are drawn in the craft's style. We make no promise about how any result will look.
