Egyptian mummy portraits show antiquity's piercing gaze in new Rome show

Egyptian mummy portraits show antiquity's piercing gaze in new Rome show

She is one of the 2,000-year-old "Faces of Fayum", startlingly realistic funerary -- or mummy -- portraits painted after Egypt became part of the Roman empire. The fragile portraits dating from the first to third centuries AD -- painted on thin wooden panels and designed to be placed over the face of mummies -- will go on display in Rome in what organisers hail as a "milestone" collaboration between Italy and Egypt. "Egypt and Rome, the Faces of…