Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Severan Tondo is a circular Roman panel painting measuring 30.5 centimeters in diameter, depicting the emperor Septimius Severus with his wife Julia Domna and their sons Caracalla and Geta in imperial regalia. One son's face has been deliberately erased. It is held at the Altes Museum in Berlin under inventory number 31329.
Most scholars identify the erased face as Geta's, removed after the Senate's declaration of damnatio memoriae against him around 212 AD. The defacement was likely carried out by the portrait's private owner as an act of loyalty to the new sole emperor, Caracalla.
Scholars date the Severan Tondo to between 199 and 200 AD. The evidence includes Geta becoming Caesar in 198 (both sons wear crowns in the portrait), Severus showing no signs of aging (his official portraits began displaying age in 202), and Caracalla, born in 188, appearing as a youth.
The Severan Tondo is in the Altes Museum in Berlin, part of the Berlin State Museums. The Antikensammlung Berlin acquired it in 1932 from a dealer in Paris, with no known provenance before that sale.
Damnatio memoriae was a formal Roman Senate declaration requiring the erasure of a condemned person's name and image throughout the empire. The Severan Tondo is one of the only surviving artworks to illustrate the physical act of defacement itself. Its erasure in a private setting shows that the practice extended beyond public monuments into personal displays of loyalty.
Both use tempera paint on wooden panels and share the Greek four-color palette of white, red, yellow, and black, as well as a single-light-source technique. Jewelry and wreaths serve as markers of cultural identity in both traditions. The tondo is believed to have been produced in the Fayum district of Egypt, possibly to mark Septimius Severus's visit to Egypt in 199 AD.