Portrait of a Man Wearing a Laurel Wreath (Roman Period, early to mid–2nd century): Artwork and History

Portrait of a Man Wearing a Laurel Wreath (Roman Period, early to mid–2nd century) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Egyptian; The Fayum, Egypt.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

This portrait belongs to a large group of similar works known as “Fayum portraits,” so-named for the region in northern Egypt in which many have been discovered. To create this man’s likeness, the artist painted a thin piece of wood with encaustic, or pigmented wax, a medium that not only gave the impression of three-dimensionality but also resisted fading and deterioration in the dry climate of Egypt. These highly individualized and lifelike portraits conveyed the wealth and status of the person depicted through clothing, jewelry, and other embellishments, such as the gold wreath of laurels worn by this man.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Man Wearing a Laurel Wreath
• Date: Roman Period, early to mid–2nd century
• Artist attribution: Egyptian; The Fayum, Egypt
• Place of origin: Al Fayyum
• Medium: Lime (linden) wood, beeswax, pigments, gold, textile, and natural resin
• Dimensions: 41.9 × 24.1 × 0.2 cm (16 1/2 × 9 1/2 × 1/8 in.)
• Type: Funerary Object
• Department: Arts of Africa
• Reference number: 1922.4799

Collection credit

Gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.