An earlier restoration of the Tondo of the Two Brothers had put fragments of the right-hand figure's mouth and chin in the wrong positions.

The painting already had genuine ancient damage. Wood-boring insects, probably termites, had tunneled through its thin wooden support and left parts of the painted surface dangerously weak. Some of what the current conservators needed to correct, however, had been done by people trying to save the object.

Egyptian and Italian specialists spent three weeks treating the portrait before it was unveiled in Cairo on October 11. They supported fragile paint, filled vulnerable losses with a lightweight material matched to the wood, treated voids beneath sunken areas, and dismantled and flattened displaced pieces before returning them to positions consistent with the surviving panel.

Part of the restoration consisted of undoing a restoration.

The object makes the problem conspicuous because the misplaced fragments belonged to a face. Painted in encaustic on wood during the Roman period and dated by the Egyptian Museum to the reign of Hadrian, the tondo shows two young men side by side. Its conventional name calls them brothers; the museum's catalogue is more cautious and says they are believed to be brothers. The circular double portrait is unusual among the mummy portraits of Roman Egypt.

Such portraits were attached to mummies, generally over the face of the deceased. Their naturalistic mode of portraiture existed within Egyptian funerary practice while drawing on the wider artistic culture of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean. The faces can appear remarkably immediate. Their material support is less impressive: a thin wooden panel carrying paint through roughly eighteen centuries of burial, insects, handling, repair, and display.

The previous repair became part of the object

Old conservation work does not remain outside an artwork's history. Adhesives age. Fillers shrink. Retouching changes color. Fragments are sometimes attached where later examination suggests they do not belong.

That history complicates the apparently simple idea of “restoring” an object. There is no untouched painting waiting underneath every later intervention.

The 2026 treatment was described as minimally invasive, with the goal of stabilizing the panel while preserving evidence of its history. Repositioning the facial fragments still required intervention. Conservators supported the exposed paint, separated displaced pieces, flattened and reinforced them, and fitted them back into the damaged support.

A face makes a small error unusually expensive. A slightly displaced piece of drapery may pass unnoticed; a shifted mouth changes an expression immediately.

The current arrangement will also become part of the conservation record. Later specialists will inherit the ancient panel, the damage, the older repairs, and the decisions made during this treatment.

Ultraviolet light found another question

Examination under ultraviolet light revealed traces in the hair of both figures that may indicate an ancient transparent varnish used to deepen dark tones.

The public report leaves that identification open. Ultraviolet fluorescence can reveal differences in surface materials and later interventions, but establishing what a material actually is may require further analysis.

That uncertainty belongs in the story. Conservation can sometimes support a direct correction, as with the displaced fragments, while producing a much more provisional observation elsewhere on the same object.

The Tondo is scheduled to leave Egypt for the first time for The Power of the Portrait: Egypt and Rome, Faces of Fayum, opening at Rome's Ara Pacis Museum on November 5. The face will arrive looking more coherent than it did before this treatment. The possible varnish in the hair remains a question.

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