Egypt unveiled on Sunday a restored version of the Tondo of the Two Brothers, a prized second-century painting from the celebrated Fayum portraits, at a press conference in the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir, Cairo. Specialists from Rome worked for three weeks alongside the museum's conservators to stabilise the work. The circular wooden panel, about 62 centimetres across, is unusual twice over: most Fayum portraits are rectangular and depict a single sitter, while this one shows two young men side by side. Painted in encaustic, with pigments mixed into molten wax, it ranks among the most lifelike surviving images from Roman-era Egypt. The restoration recovered the features of the brother on the right and addressed a termite-damaged wooden support. Fayum portraits were painted on thin wooden panels and placed over the faces of the dead inside their mummy wrappings, fusing Egyptian funerary custom with Greco-Roman portraiture. Egypt will now lend a major part of the collection to the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome for The Power of the Portrait: Egypt and Rome, Faces of Fayum, running November 5, 2026 to May 2, 2027. Works will come from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Kom Aushim Museum and the Hurghada Museum. Tourism and antiquities minister Sherif Fathy presented the project as proof of what international cooperation can achieve for cultural heritage, noting the deep historical and cultural ties between Egypt and Italy. The museum's director general, Aly Abdel Halim, said the conservation demanded careful intervention because both the termite-damaged wooden support and the painted surface were fragile. It will also mark the first time Egypt has loaned a group of Fayum portraits from its own museum collections for display abroad, a milestone for a body of work long considered among the finest survivals of ancient portraiture.