I have seen several mummy portraits in person across my travels, but this one at the Royal Ontario Museum startled me most with its vitality. The gallery was hushed, the lighting dim, and yet her presence radiated from a modest wooden panel no larger than a notebook. Many ancient works—statues, reliefs, even painted frescoes—bear the marks of distance. They feel frozen in time, admired more as artifacts than as presences. But this portrait was different. The young woman’s face carried a vitality that cut across centuries, as if the paint still held the warmth of her skin. She looked alive, not in some symbolic sense, but in the way her gaze seemed to meet mine directly.
Her aliveness was no accident. Painted in encaustic, with wax pigments that catch and reflect light, her skin has a warmth and depth that surpasses many ancient media. The artist was not content with a schematic likeness. Instead, they layered tones, shaped contours, and brought out the spark of individuality—her steady eyes, her slightly pursed lips, her jewelry carefully rendered. This realism, inherited from Roman traditions, ensured she was not simply a generic symbol of the dead but a specific, unrepeatable person. In that specificity, she feels alive.
And yet, this portrait was also meant for death. It was created to accompany her body in burial, to serve as her face in the afterlife. Egyptian custom demanded continuity of being, while Roman custom prized fidelity of likeness. The synthesis of the two produced something uncanny: an image that is not merely funerary, but almost resurrective. She looks out from the boundary of life and death, bridging presence and absence.
This bridging impulse is not unique to Roman Egypt. I thought of the funeral and post-mortem photography of the 19th century. Families would pose their deceased children as if sleeping, or sit beside their departed loved ones in one last portrait. To modern eyes these photographs can feel unsettling, but to those grieving families they were a comfort, a way of holding on. Roland Barthes, in his meditation on photography, observed that “the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent” (Camera Lucida, 1980, p. 80). To look at a photograph of the dead, he argued, was to experience both absence and presence at once. The Fayum portrait works in precisely this way: it emanates the being of the one who has gone, refusing to let her vanish entirely.
Psychologists of grief describe this same impulse in what they call “continuing bonds.” Klass, Silverman, and Nickman (1996) argued that mourning is not about severing ties with the dead, but about reshaping those ties: “the deceased remains an active presence in the lives of the bereaved, not as a memory alone but as part of ongoing relational life” (p. 7). The Fayum woman remains present in her painted form; the Victorian child remains present in the family album; and my own grandfather remains present in the interior dialogue of my thought.
When my grandfather died, I was in my early twenties. For years afterward, I would find myself talking to him in my head—sometimes asking questions, sometimes sharing small victories or disappointments. In my forties, I no longer believe in an afterlife, but I still find myself running thought experiments: how would he have reacted to this? What might he have said in his blunt but caring way? These inner conversations are not signs of denial; they are signs of continuity. They show, as grief theorists suggest, that bonds with the dead do not disappear—they evolve, becoming bridges between memory and present life.
This is why, as Ernest Becker (1973) observed in The Denial of Death, human culture itself is structured around resisting erasure. We build, write, paint, photograph, pray—not because these things defeat death, but because they deny its finality. Becker argued that the terror of mortality is so profound that cultures create symbolic systems to grant us a sense of immortality, even if only in memory. The Fayum portrait is such a system: a painted declaration that says, “I was here. Do not let me vanish.” Funeral photography was another. My conversations with my grandfather are yet another, smaller but no less real.
What lingers with me is the paradox: a woman long dead feels vividly alive, while I, alive, feel myself fleeting in her gaze. She has lasted nearly 2,000 years in wood and wax, while my own body will not. Her portrait reminds me that art, at its most powerful, is not only about representing life but about preserving it, extending it, allowing it to leap across time into another’s eyes. Whether in the warmth of encaustic paint, the cool sepia tones of a Victorian photograph, or the remembered voice of my grandfather, we return again and again to the same fragile miracle—that the ones we love might remain with us, somehow, alive in memory, alive in presence, alive in the gaze that refuses to fade.
References
Barthes, R. (1980). Camera lucida: Reflections on photography (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang.
Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.
Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing bonds: New understandings of grief. Taylor & Francis.