A dapper soldier

A young man faces the viewer frontally. His triangular face is framed by short, dark brown hair and a short beard that reaches from ears to chin. Besides a downy moustache on his upper lip, the man’s cheeks are bare, as is the area around his mouth. Large, wide-open eyes and a full mouth enhance his pleasant, open expression. He wears a white tunic and dark blue mantle secured with a gold pin over his left shoulder. A sword belt studded with golden fittings runs diagonally over his right shoulder and torso. The pale round object in the lower right corner of the panel is usually interpreted as a sword pommel, knot of fabric, or military insignium, since it appears on multiple soldier portraits.
The man’s hair is brushed straight up from his forehead and encircled with a golden crown that is usually interpreted as an attribute of the deceased, since this wooden panel was placed over the face of the deceased man and enveloped within the wrappings of his mummy. Glints of light on the forehead, nose, and right cheek give the image an astonishing liveliness, as if it were an actual portrait of the deceased. Yet comparanda among roughly contemporary mummy portraits reveal that many of the typical features are generic traits of the time, following a fashion set by the imperial family. The same traits reappear in portrait sculpture as well. This insight allowed Barbara Borg to chart a chronology of the mummy portraits on an entirely new basis, by comparing these features – and particularly the hairstyles and beards – with those of the imperial family. She was able to show that these portraits were commissioned by the upper class in the Fayum from the mid-first to the mid-third centuries AD.
The soldier in this panel painting wears a trimmed beard like the soldier’s beard that Emperor Hadrian (r. 117–138) introduced into imperial portraiture. The big eyes with large sockets and evenly arching eyebrows recall the young portraits of Marcus Aurelius.
In the 1880s, the Viennese businessman Theodor Graf acquired from the inhabitants of the Fayum a large collection of mummy portraits. He went on to present them in numerous exhibitions in Europe and America, and to resell them. In 1927 the Berlin museums bought 37 of the best pieces from his estate, thus acquiring the greatest collection of the genre outside of Egypt. Unfortunately, when the portraits were discovered they were hastily ripped out of the mummies buried in the sand – leading to the irreparable loss of important archaeological information about the deceased, including the age and type of burial.