Monday, May 7, 2007

You Look Like Hell

A painting of Dante with a model
of his skull superimposed over it
shows where artist Giotto di
Bondone went wrong.
A painting of Dante with a model
of his skull superimposed over it
shows where artist Giotto di
Bondone went wrong.
After Divine Comedy poet Dante Alighieri died in 1321, painters depicted him with a harsh countenance and an impressively pointed nose that not even his beloved Beatrice would have called handsome. But the representations may not reflect reality, according to a team of Italian anthropologists and facial-reconstruction engineers who recently created a 3-D version of Dante’s head.
Following the Manchester method of facial reconstruction, which extrapolates soft tissue from bone structure, the team used a computer to combine information from a plaster cast of Dante’s skull and from pictures and precise measurements made by a University of Bologna professor who was given permission to examine the poet’s remains in 1921, the only time his crypt has ever been opened.(more from discover)

No comments:

Post a Comment