‘Resurrecting’ a mummy in the Museum of Fine Arts with face reconstruction
MúzeumCafé 24.
Encountering a skull scientists and laypeople wonder what the actual face could have been like. Any well kept skull can be scientifically reconstructed. In the middle of the 19th century German anatomists mainly reconstructed faces of noted people whose authentic portraits existed; thus there was an opportunity for comparison. Professor Wilhelm His, a physician in Basel, reconstructed the face of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1895, and Halle professor Hermann Welcker reconstructed the painter Raphael’s face in 1884. In 1883, by projecting the outlines of the death mask on the skull Welcker established the superimposition technique, which has been successfully applied in forensic identification procedures ever since. This method also helped to identify the skull of Immanuel Kant. Both Welcker and His measured the soft tissues of the skull and sought the connection between the structure of a bone and the external appearance of muscles on that bone. The oldest skull, that of a Copper Age man, was reconstructed by Schaffhausen in 1884, while Eickstedt’s 1925 reconstruction was based on a Neanderthal man’s skull. In Hungary Jenő Hillebrand, Károly Árpás, Gyula Skultéty and his student, Ágnes Kustár. Depending on how developed the muscle adhesion surfaces are, the thickness of the muscles is ascertained with the help of a table drawn up by Röhrer, Ertl and Helmer in 1984 and based on the data of the average soft tissue thicknesses measured at anthropological points. Reconstruction is preceded by detailed anthropological analysis of the skull.