Portrait of a thin-faced, bearded man

The term encaustic designates painting in which beeswax is mixed with pigments. The technique was first used by Greek painters of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Ancient descriptions are difficult to interpret, and Egyptian mummy portraits–the only works in the medium surviving from antiquity–have not yet been analyzed extensively. Therefore, many questions concerning the details of the techniques used by mummy-portrait painters remain open, although the work of a few scholars and modern artists who paint in encaustic has provided some insight.