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Original Shakespeare Portrait Discovered, Disputed
Reader Hugh Pickens sends in news from the NYTimes a few days back of what is believed to be a 400-year-old portrait of William Shakespeare, painted 6 years before his death. No existing portrait, that most experts consider to be genuine, was captured during Shakespeare's lifetime. "It shows Shakespeare as a far more alluring figure than the solemn-faced, balding image that has been conveyed by previous engravings, busts and portraits. 'His face is open and alive, with a rosy, rather sweet expression, perhaps suggestive of modesty,' said a brochure for an exhibition opening in Stratford. The portrait came to light when Alec Cobbe visited the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2006 to see an exhibition, 'Searching for Shakespeare,' and realized that the Folger portrait, whose authenticity had been doubted for decades, was a copy of the one that had been in his family's art collection since the mid-18th century, with the family unaware that the man depicted might be Shakespeare. Scientific studies at Cambridge showed that the oak panel on which the Cobbe portrait was mounted came from trees felled in the last 20 years of the 16th century, pointing to a date for the painting in the early 1600s." For balance, the New Yorker disputes some of the claims in the NYTimes account, and for good measure tosses in another purported Shakespeare portrait from life, this one discovered 3 years ago in Canada.
"God has given you one face, and you make yourself another."
~ William Shakespeare
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
That which we call a portrait from any other time period would look as similar.
So this portrait would, were it painted later, retain that dear perfection which it holds without that title.
"For balance..." kdawson: Fair and balanced news (for nerds)!
is WAY too real.
Read radical news here
That's not Shakespeare, it's clearly Sir Francis Bacon.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Whatever the end result is on the authenticity of either of these portraits, it seems every portrait shares the basic physical traits that we collectively think of as "Shakespeare". Moreover, from what I can tell they seem to be in line with his bust in Holy Trinity Church which was erected not terribly long after his death. It seems to me that if any of these portraits/busts/etc. had been far from the mark, there would have been some sort of protest from the people who knew him when he was alive (or commissioned the work). In the end, we will never know exactly what he looks like, but we do have a pretty good idea.
Douglas Whitaker
I don't see what the big deal is. Look, if you put an unlimited amount of monkeys in a room with paint supplies and canvas, eventually they would have made that painting... right?
Shakespeare, Makespeare. Just another bunch of Clichés strung together.
That's totally Photoshopped. I can see the streak marks.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Right now the summary reads: "...NYTimes a few days back of what is believed to be a 500-year-old portrait of William Shakespeare, painted 6 years before his death."
If the portrait is 500 years old, and it was painted 6 years before his death, I believe I'm being told that Shakespeare died in AD 2009 - 500 + 6 = 1515. This page says that Shakespeare was born 1564. How could Shakespeare have died before he was born? Even if this is true though, and he lived his entire life and wrote all his works while in his mother's womb and died in there in 1515, how could his corpse remain in there for some 49 years when he was still-born? And besides this, how did he develop bodily and mentally in utero such that he was able to lead a life as he did? How did he compose and direct and act? And then how did the artist figure what Shakespeare looked like? Is that the news I'm missing here? Did they have some sort of ultra-sound technology in 1509 and we've just re-discovered this now?
I can tell from the brushstrokes and having seen a few 'shops in my time.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
it turned out to actually be a portrait of Sir Francis Bacon...
was he really that great? i mean, not many people even cared enough to take a picture.
An elaborate fake perhaps, but still a fake. Yes, the frame is made from trees from the period but the only difference between the canvas and existing paintings is that this time the man has a beard and features painted in a different light.
Even a moderate understudy of art could have produced this.
Or, doth mine eyes deceive me?
.
The article uses 400, rather than 500, years, so the summary is wrong. And why is your post modded funny instead of informative?
Or, doth mine eyes deceive me?
Horatio:
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Hamlet:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
-- Hamlet, Act I, Scene V
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
That's not Shakespeare, it's clearly Sir Francis Bacon.
No it's not. It's... it's... it's... Christopher Marlowe!
Even 400 year later, the loony theories abound.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
> Scientific studies at Cambridge showed that the oak panel on which the Cobbe portrait was mounted came from trees felled in the last 20 years of the 16th century, pointing to a date for the painting in the early 1600s."
Big deal. Go find any church being torn down and you can find really old timbers, pews, rafters, tables, etc.
Its not hard to get old wood, especially since the advent of Viagra.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Meatwad gets the honeys G.
"His face is open and alive, with a rosy..."
Rosy eh?
However, Eric Phelps, author of Vatican Assassins, would insist that this is not the 'Rosicrucian mask' of the Baconian's but that the Spear shaker's true identity was that of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
Whatever the real identity of these folks I'll bet my ballsack they're all Widows sons.
Normalise the sizes. Pick points on the images which mark particular features (corner of eye for instance) and then average them to reduce the errors.
e.g.
http://www.faceresearch.org/demos/average
Deleted
Quick, burn all his damn books!
This is my sig.
and those with a vested interested (the proclaimer of this discovery is the "Chairman of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust"), Shakespeare's identity itself continues to be hotly debated because there is precious little _real_ evidence for the traditional candidate. (Harpers Magazine had a good full-length feature interviewing proponents of different theories ten years ago, and AFAIK none of them have changed their minds since then.) If, like me, you are one of those poor individuals believing the evidence of who he was is both inadequate and unsettled (see upthread snark re Marlowe and Bacon), a face attached to a tenuous familial attribute to the wrong person is not exciting.
I disagree (viscerally) with Joseph Sobran on political issues, but found the book he wrote suggesting Edward de Vere as Shakespeare to contain both a well-researched, logical consideration of the available _factual_ evidence (vanishingly small despite the volumes that have been written) and a fair argument for his candidate.
Basically, Stanley Wells is bypassing the argument as presettled, and given his position, who could blame him? For all that, given the dating and general provenance, the picture might actually _be_ of Shakespeare, but it ain't based on anything more factual than the several other portraits with sketchy attributions from the same time period.
.... this is the earliest recorded instance of "Pics or it didn't happen".
Have gnu, will travel.
Why do you have to mix two different measurement systems to the confusion of the readers? Why give dates as both 16th century (meaning the 1500s) and 1600s (meaning the 17th century) in the same d@mn sentence? Pick one method and stick with it!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
He's writing a /. post, not a technical spec. If you read history books for long enough you'll soon get bored reading the same thing over and over again. Sounds like you need to hang with Mr Cowper: "variety is the spice of life", after all. ;-)
Couldn't stand the weather
who is Thursday next ?