Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 know about that, but I'll put even money he was less than six degrees from Bacon.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, which much later starred Leonardo DiCaprio, who was in Critters 3 with Geoffrey Blake, who was in Frost/Nixon with Kevin Bacon. I win :)
Translation : I've been dead for 500 years, and I've written all this great stuff. Why do you care what I looked like? Go read a book, stop looking at me.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
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?
Shakespeare? Isn't he the guy that invented the ball-point pen?