#birkbeckvoices

Using digital analysis, Dr Laura Jacobus has revealed that two portraits of an early 14th-century Paduan businessman, created by different artists 25 years apart, had identical underlying bone structures. She shows that the sculptures are the first known examples of portraits using mechanical means to show an exact physical likeness of their subject – something which did not become a standard feature of portraiture until the advent of photography six centuries later. In this podcast, Dr Jacobus talks about the significance of these findings, how the approach taken by Enrico Scrovegni fitted into the broader artistic trends of the time and how this served as an antecedent to today’s portrait-saturated society, where creating an exact physical likeness or a portrait’s subject is the norm. - '“Propria Figura”: The Advent of Facsimile Portraiture in Italian Art'; L Jacobus; Art Bulletin, Issue 2 (2017)http://bit.ly/2iFuSbM - Dr Laura Jacobus http://bit.ly/2vjQCLJ - Department of History of Art http://bit.ly/