Posted on 10/30/2007 2:03:48 PM PDT by blam
Mystery of 'missing' Shakespeare portrait
30 October 2007
NewScientist.com news service
It is the kind of argument William Shakespeare himself would have enjoyed. On one side is a claim that a famous portrait of the Bard has gone missing and been replaced by a fake. On the other side, the claim is dismissed as nonsense.
The row is over a painting of Shakespeare known as the Flower portrait. Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel from the University of Mainz, Germany, examined the portrait in 1996 and pronounced it an authentic representation of Shakespeare, painted in 1609. In 2006, the National Portrait Gallery in London exhibited what it believes to be the same portrait, but what Hammerschmidt-Hummel claims is a copy. This copy, she says, has a more modern wooden panel, and the outline of a Madonna detected beneath the paint by X-rays in 2005 is significantly different from that recorded in a 1966 X-ray. The painting she examined in 1996, Hammerschmidt-Hummel says, has "vanished" and been replaced by a copy.
Not true, insists Tarnya Cooper, who examined the painting in 2005 as curator at the National Portrait Gallery. The idea that the original Flower portrait had been substituted by a copy was "plainly nonsensical".
There's another twist. Cooper says that in any case the Flower portrait was not painted in Shakespeare's time; it is a 19th-century fake. She puts down any perceived differences in images of the painting to lighting conditions.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
The Flower Portrait
Based on the famous engraving which appeared in the first printed edition of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623, this portrait was produced in the early 19th Century.
The work was purchased by Edgar Flower in 1892 and presented to the Royal Shakespeare Company three years later.
Chandos Portrait
Grafton Portrait
Sanders Portrait
The Janssen Portrait
The Soest Portrait
I’m thinking the 460-year-old clam had something to do with this.
Yes, they are. Really, what a damn fraud.
All are remarkably similar. Must be good representations of the man.
It was the 400th year of Shakespeare’s birth, When mentioned to Picasso, he took a piece of paper and using pen and ink, used only 14 lines to do the drawing.
The critics were ecstatic! A Picasso worth a fortune! 14 lines! Wow!
Others said it was just a scribble and worth nothing.
Then of course there is the age-old controversy that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays.
This topic was posted , thanks blam.
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