A study in purple
Today, more than 1,000 of these mummy portraits survive in museums and collections around the world.
Portrait of a Bearded Man
Parsing the properties of Egyptian purple pigments
Between 30 BC and the 3rd century AD, during which period Egypt was a province of the Roman Empire, a practice developed of attaching a portrait of a mummified individual to their mummy wrappings. Approximately 1,100 of these paintings have…