Fayum mummy portraits
Since references to "imagines" often fail to distinguish between stone or bronze commemorative portrait busts - extant examples of which are abundant - and funeral masks made of more perishable materials, none can be identified with certainty as having survived. Three-dimensional, highly realistic images of deceased nobles are known to have been consumed by fire in the highest status cremation funerals; for example, at Sulla's and Julius Caesar's funerals. Among the non-elite, child burials were sometimes accompanied by a plaster death mask, or in some cases, the plaster negative mould from which such a mask, or the child's face, could be reconstructed; "the means for constructing the memory of families who invested their ambitions in their descendants and substituted their children for illustrious ancestors." The veristic tradition of funerary likenesses, however, contributed to the development of realistic Roman portraiture. In Roman Egypt, the Fayum mummy portraits reflect traditions of Egyptian and Roman funerary portraiture and the techniques of Hellenistic painting.