Object and Identity in a Digital Age
CHArt 25th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Object and Identity in a Digital Age
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Marcus Risdell, Garrick Club
Cut and Paste Art History: Image Manipulation as Spurious Art Historical Proof of the Face of Shakespeare
In 2006 Professor Hildegard Hammerscmidt-Hummel authenticated a series of portraits of Shakespeare as life portraits. The methods presented in her book The True Face of Shakespeare included such techniques as computer tomography, laser scanning and photogrammetry to compare the various portraits. The results were presented in a series of photomontages and virtual 3D models produced using software including Photoshop and Rapid Form. Comparisons were made with the two authoritative portraits of Shakespeare, the Memorial in Holy Trinity Church Stratford-upon-Avon and the frontispiece engraving to the First Folio edition of his Works, by Martin Droeshout. The Professor declared a match between these and the so-called ‘Davenant Bust’ in the Garrick Club, the ‘Flower’ portrait in the collection of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the discredited Darmstadt Death Mask.
The publication of Hammerscmidt-Hummel’s book coincided with the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Searching for Shakespeare which included the ‘Flower’ portrait. Prior to exhibition it had been subjected to various investigations in the conservation studio, one of which uncovered the presence of chrome-yellow, a manufactured pigment first extracted from the mineral crocoite by the French chemist Louis Vauquelin in only 1809. The ‘Flower’ is a definite fake. The Professor’s theory is further undermined as the Garrick Club bust is in fact the work of Louis François Roubiliac and dates from the mid-eighteenth century. The use of computer imaging tools in this case gave credence to a theory that was intrinsically flawed from the outset.
This paper will examine the evidence, and ask whether such image manipulation can have a role in the practice of art history in an era where the software is increasingly available. The example provided by the face of Shakespeare is particularly timely as summer 2009 saw the exhibition of a newly uncovered ‘Life’ portrait at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon. The evidence for the so-called ‘Cobbe’ portrait is again controversial, and on the cover of the accompanying book can be found a digital montage of the portrait superimposed over the Droeshout engraving from the First Folio.
Marcus Risdell is an art and theatre historian. After graduating from St Andrews and the Courtauld Institute of Art he became a freelance cataloguer and researcher. As Curator and Librarian at the Garrick Club he has launched on-line catalogues for both the Club’s art collections and library. He is author of The Young Davy Garrick; Rise of a Superstar for a book to accompany the Dr Johnson’s House exhibition Behind the Scenes: The Hidden Life of Georgian Theatre, 1737-1784, and his introduction can be found in the British Library / Society for Theatre Research 2008 facsimile of James Winston’s Theatric Tourist, originally published in 1805. In 2009 he co-curated The Face & Figure of Shakespeare, an exhibition of 18th century sculptures of Shakespeare at Orleans House Gallery, Richmond, London, which included a modern facsimile of the Garrick Club bust by Roubiliac, commissioned from Conservation Technologies at the National Conservation Centre in Liverpool and fabricated using laser-scanning techniques. He sits on the Committee of the Society for Theatre Research and is the Chairman of the Association of Pall Mall Libraries.