The Pellagra Portraits.

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews the history of pellagra and recounts the role of artist and illustrator John Carroll who, in 1919, painted portraits of people with the vitamin deficiency to document in color the appearance of pellagra skin plaques.

Trece de diciembre de 1474. Epidemia de ceguera el día de la proclamación de Isabel la Católica: una licencia turística / December 13, 1474. Epidemic of blindness from the proclamation of Isabel la Católica: a tourist license

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The infant mummy's face-Paleoradiological investigation and comparison between facial reconstruction and mummy portrait of a Roman-period Egyptian child.

In Graeco-Roman times in the Lower-Egyptian Fayoum region, a painted portrait was traditionally placed over the face of a deceased individual. These mummy portraits show considerable inter-individual diversity. This suggests that those portraits were created separately for each individual. In the present study, we investigated a completely wrapped young infant mummy with a typical mummy portrait by whole body CT analysis. This was used to obtain physical information on the infant and provided the basis for a virtual face reconstruction in order to compare it to the mummy portrait. We identified the mummy as a 3-4 years old male infant that had been prepared according to the typical ancient Egyptian mummification rites. It most probably suffered from a right-sided pulmonary infection which may also be the cause of death. The reconstructed face showed considerable similarities to the portrait, confirming the portrait's specificity to this individual. However, there are some differences between portrait and face. The portrait seems to show a slightly older individual which may be due to artistic conventions of that period.

La hipermetropía del conde István Tisza / The hypermetropia of count István Tisza

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The enigmatic strabismus of Albrecht Dürer.

The author discusses several of Albrecht Dürer's selfportraits. In some portraits his eyes are straight and in some others a divergent squint is present. Did Dürer do this on purpose or whas the squint indeed intermittently present? Analysis of the portrait of his mother gave the explanation.

A Self-Portrait of Michelangelo Buonarroti Hidden in a Drawing from the Ashmolean Museum.

The discovery was recently announced in the scientific literature of a self-caricature of the great Renaissance artist and genius of human anatomy, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), concealed in a drawing from 1525. This drawing is held in the collection of the British Museum in London, England. In it, the artist portrayed the Marchesa di Pescara, Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547). The present article considers evidence that Michelangelo may have depicted himself in another portrait of Vittoria Colonna, dated to approximately 1522, which is currently in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. This concealed silhouetted figure displays physical features strikingly similar to those depicted in portraits of Michelangelo by his contemporaries, and in the description of the artist by Michelangelo's biographer, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574): the large body, the shape of the face, the beard and the flattened nose. In this context, the present article could serve to facilitate analyses of the physical form and even of the state of health (from 1522) of one of the foremost anatomists of the Renaissance. Clin. Anat., 2018. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Differences over time in head orientation in European portrait paintings.

There is evidence for a tendency for European portrait paintings to have the head oriented so that the left side of the face is visible more than the right side. This is particularly the case for female sitters. There is evidence that the left side of the face shows emotion more than the right side does, so it has been proposed that there is a tendency for artists or sitters to want to show more of the emotionality of the sitter. It is shown here that the left-side tendency varies by date. In two studies, large samples were drawn from European gallery collections (study 1) and the National Portrait Gallery in London (study 2). The studies showed a strong left side tendency before 1600, absence of the tendency in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and some recurrence of it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modulated by changing gender differences. These findings show that cultural, historical, or art-historical factors are likely to be involved in determining tendencies in head orientation as well as psychological ones.

A Greek physician's portrait in Windsor Castle.

To the visitor to Windsor Castle, the Thomas Lawrence portraits in the Waterloo Chamber represent the most important contributors to the military defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, by British, Prussian, Russian and Austrian forces at the Battle of Waterloo. Nevertheless, only few individuals realise that a Greek physician, Count Ioannis Capodistrias, a native of the island of Corfu, stands among these leading personalities as a diplomat, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who contributed remarkably to European unity in the early nineteenth century and as a statesman ('Governor' of Greece) with a tragic end to his life, after establishing a Greek State practically from ruins.

William Withering's portrait.

The story of how William Withering's portrait painted in Birmingham in 1792 ended up in the Swedish Nationalmuseum 139 years later.