Mozart was a genius of a character painter, providing in his music vivid likenesses of such friends as the coloratura soprano Aloysia Weber and the clarinetist Anton Stadler.

Other faces, in burnt-brown colors on lighter grounds, suggest Etruscan antecedents and even the influence of Fayum portraits, the vivid likenesses found on Egyptian mummy cases.

The fisherman did not wonder by what art the ancients had preserved the body in such a vivid likeness of life, which kept the muscular limbs full and unshrunken, the dark flesh vital.

But his most vivid likenesses are of himself and his family.