Among the most seductive objects to have come down to us from antiquity are the funerary portrait panels originally attached to mummies from the years when Egypt was part of the Roman Empire. These roughly life-size, broadly painted heads, with their wide eyes and calm expressions, stare us down, demanding that attention be paid. Often known as Fayum portraits, although not all of them come from the Fayum in northern Egypt, they are so vivid and present that it can be hard to remember that they were made in the first three centuries A.D. Some of the most accomplished funerary portraits would look right at home hanging beside Edouard Manet’s paintings from the 1860s—the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s wonderful head of Victorine Meurent (ca. 1862), the model who posed for Olympia, The Luncheon on the Grass, and The Street Singer, for example. Others have the economy and directness of a Matisse and the itemized eyelashes of an Alex Katz. If mummification was intended to ensure that the deceased had an intact, perfect body in which to spend the afterlife, the lively portraits suggest that he or she would enjoy a distinctive appearance, often in the prime of life—there are few surviving portraits of elderly or aged people—with a fashionable hairstyle and jewelry (at least if the family was able to afford it; mummy portraits were a privilege of the elite). While the painted panels may be the best-known funerary portraits