Fayum mummy portraits

Mummy portraits or Fayum mummy portraits is the modern term given to a type of naturalistic painted portrait on wooden boards attached to Upper class mummies from Roman Egypt. They belong to the tradition of panel painting, one of the most highly regarded forms of art in the Classical world. The Fayum portraits are the only large body of art from that tradition to have survived.
Embalming

Embalming is the art and science of preserving human or animal remains by treating them to forestall decomposition. The intention is usually to make the deceased suitable for public or private viewing as part of the funeral ceremony, or keep them preserved for medical purposes in an anatomical laboratory. The three goals of embalming are sanitization, presentation, and preservation, with restoration being an important additional factor in some instances. Performed successfully embalming can help preserve the body for a duration of many years. Embalming has a very long and cross-cultural history, with many cultures giving the embalming processes a greater religious meaning.
Bronze sculpture

Bronze is the most popular metal for cast metal sculptures; a cast bronze sculpture is often called simply a "bronze". It can be used for statues, singly or in groups, reliefs, and small statuettes and figurines, as well as bronze elements to be fitted to other objects such as furniture. It is often gilded to give gilt-bronze or ormolu.
Effigy
An effigy is a representation of a specific person in the form of sculpture or some other three-dimensional medium. The use of the term is normally restricted to certain contexts in a somewhat arbitrary way: recumbent effigies on tombs are so called, but standing statues of individuals, or busts, are usually not. Likenesses of religious figures in sculpture are not normally called effigies. Effigies are common elements of funerary art, especially as a recumbent effigy in stone or metal placed on a tomb, or a less permanent "funeral effigy", placed on the coffin in a grand funeral, wearing real clothing.
Plaster cast

A plaster cast is a copy made in plaster of another 3-dimensional form. The original from which the cast is taken may be a sculpture, building, a face, a pregnant belly, a fossil or other remains such as fresh or fossilised footprints – particularly in palaeontology.
Bust (sculpture)

A bust is a sculpted or cast representation of the upper part of the human figure, depicting a person's head and neck, and a variable portion of the chest and shoulders. The piece is normally supported by a plinth. The bust is generally a portrait intended to record the appearance of an individual, but may sometimes represent a type. They may be of any medium used for sculpture, such as marble, bronze, terracotta, wax or wood.
Ancient Egyptian funerary practices

The ancient Egyptians had an elaborate set of funerary practices that they believed were necessary to ensure their immortality after death. These rituals and protocols included mummifying the body, casting magic spells, and burial with specific grave goods thought to be needed in the Egyptian afterlife.
Art of ancient Egypt

Ancient Egyptian art is the painting, sculpture, architecture and other arts produced by the civilization of ancient Egypt in the lower Nile Valley from about 3000 BC to 30 AD. Ancient Egyptian art reached a high level in painting and sculpture, and was both highly stylized and symbolic. It was famously conservative, and Egyptian styles changed remarkably little over more than three thousand years. Much of the surviving art comes from tombs and monuments and now there is an emphasis on life after death and the preservation of knowledge of the past. The wall art was never meant to be seen by people other than the afterlife for when they needed them.
Roman funerary practices

Roman funerary practices include the Ancient Romans' religious rituals concerning funerals, cremations, and burials. They were part of the Tradition, the unwritten code from which Romans derived their social norms.
Mask of Agamemnon

The Mask of Agamemnon is a gold funeral mask discovered at the ancient Greek site of Mycenae. The mask, displayed in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, has been described by Cathy Gere as the "Mona Lisa of prehistory".
Verism

Verism is the artistic preference of contemporary everyday subject matter instead of the heroic or legendary in art and literature; it is a form of realism. The word comes from Latin verus (true).
Wax sculpture

A wax sculpture is a depiction made using a waxy substance. Often these are effigies, usually of a notable individual, but there are also death masks and scenes with many figures, mostly in relief.
Reserve head

Reserve heads are distinctive sculptures made primarily of fine limestone that have been found in a number of non-royal tombs of the Fourth dynasty of Egypt; primarily from the reigns of pyramid-building pharaohs Khufu to Khafre, circa 2551-2496 B.C. While each of the heads share characteristics in common with each other, the striking individuality of the pieces makes them some of the earliest examples of portrait sculpture in existence. Their purpose is not entirely clear; the name comes from the prevalent theory first put forward, in 1903, by the German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt that the head was to serve as an alternate home for the spirit of the dead owner should anything happen to its body.
L'Inconnue de la Seine

L'Inconnue de la Seine was an unidentified young woman whose putative death mask became a popular fixture on the walls of artists' homes after 1900. Her visage inspired numerous literary works. In the United States, the mask is also known as "La Belle Italienne".
Roman portraiture

Roman portraiture was one of the most significant periods in the development of portrait art. Originating from ancient Rome, it continued for almost five centuries. Roman portraiture is characterised by unusual realism and the desire to convey images of nature in the high quality style often seen in ancient Roman art. Some busts even seem to show clinical signs. Several images and statues made in marble and bronze have survived in small numbers. Roman funerary art includes many portraits such as married couple funerary reliefs, which were most often made for wealthy freedmen rather than the patrician elite.
Animal mummy

Animal mummification originated in ancient Egypt. They mummified various animals. It was an enormous part of Egyptian culture, not only in their role as food and pets, but also for religious reasons. They were typically mummified for four main purposes—to allow beloved pets to go on to the afterlife, to provide food in the afterlife, to act as offerings to a particular god, and because some were seen as physical manifestations of specific gods that the Egyptians worshipped. Bast, the cat goddess is an example of one such deity. In 1888, an Egyptian farmer digging in the sand near Istabl Antar discovered a mass grave of felines, ancient cats that were mummified and buried in pits at great numbers.
Portraiture in ancient Egypt

Portraiture in ancient Egypt forms a conceptual attempt to portray "the subject from its own perspective rather than the viewpoint of the artist ... to communicate essential information about the object itself". Ancient Egyptian art was a religious tool used "to maintain perfect order in the universe" and to substitute for the real thing or person through its representation.
Pseudo-athlete

Pseudo-athlete is a concept in Roman portraiture, favored in the late Republican Period, to describe a sculpture that has a combination of a veristic head and an idealized body. Verism shows the person portrayed without idealizing features, with warts, wrinkles, and other physical defects and deformities. Verism goes beyond a realistic rendering. There was a positive value of age and experience in Rome, so it manipulates the facial expression in an attempt to convey the stern traditional Roman values. One of the potential origins of the veristic style is from Roman funeral masks. The masks were used to give an impersonation of the deceased at the Roman Forum. Therefore, it was critical that the masks reproduced the appearance of the deceased and portrayed all of their features. The public funerals were to portray the character of the deceased, so artists were encouraged to make the masks as expressive as possible using the traditionally prized Roman values: stern moral seriousness (gravitas), firmness and strictness of judgement (severitas), determination and self-possession (constantia), and so on. While the origin of verism is highly debated as to whether it was from Italic, Etruscan, Roman, Egyptian, or Greek influence, the purpose for realistic, unidealized rendering was specific. The signs of age were used as indicators of wisdom and authority. The body remains idealized due to Greek influence. In Greek sculpture there is a concept of heroic nudity. It is used to indicate that a sculpture's apparently mortal human subject is in fact a hero or semi-divine being.
Death masks of Mycenae

The death masks of Mycenae are a series of golden funerary masks found on buried bodies within a burial site titled Grave Circle A, located within the ancient Greek city of Mycenae. There are seven discovered masks in total, found with the burials of six adult males and one male child. There were no women who had masks. They were discovered by Heinrich Schliemann during his 1876 excavation of Mycenae.