Egypt will lend a major part of its mummy-portrait collection to an exhibition in Rome, taking works usually kept at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir abroad for the first time. The exhibition will run from November to May 2027, and Egypt unveiled a restored portrait as part of the announcement. Cultural institutions and officials are arranging the collection’s move.
A collection under institutional custody
The featured work, the “Tondo of the Two Brothers,” is a 2nd-century painting from the Fayoum portraits. Its circular shape and depiction of two people rather than one make it unusual, experts say. It ranks among the most vivid surviving portraits from Roman-era Egypt. Those details make it the exhibition’s headline object. The wider decision is that a major part of a collection normally kept in Cairo will travel to Rome.
Artists painted the portraits primarily on thin wooden panels, then placed them over the deceased’s faces within mummy wrappings. They combine Egyptian funerary traditions with artistic influences from the wider Greco-Roman world. Today, the objects move through modern institutions: the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir, Egyptian officials, specialists from Rome, and the exhibition organizer, MondoMostre. The announcement describes cooperation among those bodies, but gives local or grassroots groups no role in deciding the collection’s movement.
Cooperation, on officials’ terms
Specialists from Rome worked with conservators from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir for three weeks to restore the painting, officials said at a press conference. Egypt’s minister of tourism and antiquities, Sherif Fathy, called the work “an important example of what can be achieved through international cooperation in the preservation and study of cultural heritage.” He said Egypt and Italy share “deep historical and cultural ties,” and that the project brings together Egyptian and Italian expertise “to preserve an exceptional work of art for future generations.”
The statement presents the restoration as a partnership between national institutions. It gives no further detail about the loan’s terms or how officials made the decision. The announcement makes no claims about an NGO role, grassroots organizing, or public participation. Its named actors are officials, museum conservators, specialists, and the exhibition organizer.
The fragile object, and the larger show
Aly Abdel Halim, director general of the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir, said termites damaged the wooden support and left the painted surface fragile, requiring careful intervention. Restorers used a technique involving pigments mixed with molten wax, and recovered the features of the brother on the right. The restoration account specifies the material danger and the work performed. The public announcement, meanwhile, places the result within a larger program of international display.
Tomaso Radaelli, chairman of MondoMostre, said the exhibition will bring together more than 110 objects. They include painted panels, funerary shrouds, masks, marble portraits, plaster casts, and ancient jewelry. The exhibition is set to run from November to May 2027. The announcement celebrates preservation and cultural ties, but doesn’t specify the practical terms for the collection’s trip.