SOME nifty detective work on a little-known bust from London strongly suggests that a 17th-century death mask really is that of William Shakespeare.
Forensic imaging techniques have shown that the Davenant bust, which is housed in London鈥檚 Garrick Club, is the same person as in portraits of Shakespeare. The bust鈥檚 facial features, in turn, are 鈥渁 perfect match鈥� with the death mask (far right), which is owned by the German city of Darmstadt, says Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel from the University of Mainz, who led the research.
Shakespeare died aged 52 in 1616, the same year inscribed into the rear of the mask, which was discovered in 1842. However, leading scholars of the dramatist argue that it was not a close enough match to bona fide likenesses to be authentic (快猫短视频, 21 October 1995, p 12).
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The new twist in the tale came after Hammerschmidt-Hummel saw the bust in London. Historians had previously dismissed it as inaccurate because they believed it had been made 142 years after the playwright died, by the French sculptor Louis-Fran莽ois Roubiliac.
Hammerschmidt-Hummel asked Reinhardt Altmann of the German Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigation to compare the bust with an engraving and two paintings widely believed to be of Shakespeare, including the famous Chandos portrait (above left).
Using a technique employed by the police to test whether separate facial images belong to the same person, Altmann found close matches around the eyes, nose and lips of the paintings and the bust, leading him to the 鈥渋nescapable conclusion that one person is represented here鈥�, he says.
Engineers from imaging company Konica Minolta Europe then scanned the bust and the death mask with lasers to build 3D computer models. Superimposing the models revealed perfect matches between the forehead, eyes and nose. The lips on the death mask are noticeably thinner than those on the bust, but they would have shrunk with the loss of blood pressure after death, says Hammerschmidt-Hummel. In a book published this week, she claims to have traced the history of the bust back to 1613, when Shakespeare could have commissioned it.
鈥淭he death mask and bust showed perfect matches between the forehead, eyes and nose鈥�
However, British experts are yet to be entirely convinced. Her results are based on a 鈥渇alse premise鈥�, says Catherine Alexander of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. She points out that many representations of Elizabethan men were 鈥渟pruced up鈥� to make them look intelligent and rich, and were not really intended as true likenesses. That鈥檚 why busts and portraits from the time often look similar, she says.
