Egypt on Sunday unveiled a restored version of “Tondo of the Two Brothers,” a prized second-century painting from the famed Fayoum portraits. Specialists from Rome worked alongside conservators from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir—where the collection is usually kept—for three weeks to restore the artwork, officials said at a press conference, the AP reports. Fayoum mummy portraits were painted primarily on thin wooden panels and placed over the faces of the deceased within mummy wrappings, combining Egyptian funerary traditions with artistic influences from the wider Greco-Roman world. Egypt will lend a major part of the collection to an exhibition in Rome from November to May, the first time it will travel abroad.
“The restoration of the ‘Tondo of the Two Brothers’ is an important example of what can be achieved through international cooperation in the preservation and study of cultural heritage,” said Sherif Fathy, Egypt’s minister of tourism and antiquities. “Egypt and Italy share deep historical and cultural ties, and this project brings together Egyptian and Italian expertise to preserve an exceptional work of art for future generations.” Experts describe the painting as unusual because of its circular shape and its depiction of two people instead of one, and rank it among the most vivid surviving portraits from Roman-era Egypt. It was painted using a technique in which pigments are mixed with molten wax, and restorers were able to recover the features of the brother on the right. Officials said the wooden support, damaged by termites, and the painted surface had become fragile.