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Anonymous, Portrait of a Young Woman, beginning of 2nd c. CE, encaustic on panel, 34.3 x 17.8 cm, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. This naturalistic portrait of a young woman, whose head is slightly turned to reveal an arresting gaze, is one of around nine hundred Fayum funeral portraits that were created in Egypt beginning in the late first century BCE, after the Roman annexation of Egypt, until the third and fourth centuries CE, when the Roman Empire underwent irrevocable cultural changes and an economic crisis. After the annexation, Egyptian aristocracy intermarried with Romans and Greeks who had settled in Egypt. This is evidenced by the Greek and Roman names on some Egyptian-style gilded mummy cases. Found in the Fayum Basin, Fayum portraits exemplify the new practice of Family Works: A Multiplicity of Meanings and Contexts | http://www.concordia.ca/familyworks replacing the masks of mummies with realistic Greco-Roman portraits. The encaustic technique used to produce this work involves painting with hot coloured waxes. The direction of the strokes follows the form of the facial traits. The paint on the nose, cheeks, chin and the contours of the eyes was applied with a thicker layer, while the contours of the face and hair were drafted over the liquid paints. Paintings done this way with such a durable material as wax retain a surprisingly rare freshness of colour. English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie has proposed that Fayum portraits were painted while their subjects were alive, and were hung on the wall in their houses before assuming a funereal function after their deaths. The mummy portraits from the Fayum Oasis represent exceptional examples of surviving Greco-Roman portraiture. Alena Krasnikova Family Works: A Multiplicity of Meanings and Contexts | http://www.concordia.ca/familyworks