We don’t have lifelike portraits of anyone until at least the Renaissance. Even the best sculptures and paintings from ancient Rome, Greece or China are stylized or idealized.
At least that’s what I used to think until I learned of the Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt. They were created from around the birth of Christ until the third century. The portraits were painted on wood panels covering mummies and showed what the person underneath used to look like. They’re lifelike and were created at a high level of skill that wasn’t reached anywhere until the European Renaissance. Some of them are very well preserved in what seems to be the original color. The faces, and the corpses underneath, are young, with hardly anyone appearing to be older than 30, reflecting the low life expectancy of antiquity.
Nehaveigur 