A bearded man looks back at you from his mummified cocoon, his face absolutely alive. His eyes are dark and pensive in a face that emerges from the shadows in full perspective, each black hair bristling. This kind of painted simulacrum created in Egypt in the second century AD wouldn’t be technically possible again until the age of Jan van Eyck.
And somewhere underneath this uncanny living portrait is the dead man himself. This is a rare surviving example of a Roman-era Egyptian mummy that has never been unwrapped or had its portrait removed. It makes you wonder what you are looking at – a work of art or a dead person or, as this exhibition suggests, another thing entirely.
