The Folio Engraving: An Early Piltdown Man?
From the inbox: a guest post from Nancy Maude
The subject, thoughts, comments, opinions, views or theories expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the position or beliefs of the SAT as an organisation or any of its individual Trustees or members. The article has been prepared by the author in their personal capacity.
In 1953, Oxford scientists used fluorine dating to reveal that a skull found in the village of Piltdown was a hoax, an amalgam of a human brain and an ape’s jaw. Similarly, modern computer technology indicates the Droeshout Folio engraving to be a fabricated concoction of the head of a Spanish Catholic priest atop the costume of a British man. A widely-recognized face recognition computer program, Amazon Rekognition, compared two engravings by Martin Droeshout – the Folio engraving and a portrait of Francisco De la Pena (1540-1612); the program identified the probability that the two portraits were the same man as 94.9 per cent.
The Droeshout Folio portrait has long been noted for its awkward presentation. Tarnya Cooper, curator of the UK National Portrait Gallery’s 2006 exhibition on Shakespeare’s portraits, described the engraving as “poorly proportioned,” with a head that appears “slightly too large for the body”, suggesting that the artist worked with two images independently: one of the head and the other of the costumed body. Cooper matched the costume to the fashion of Englishmen (c. 1604-20) but pointed to the artist’s discrepancies in depicting the construction of the costume as indicating that the engraving is a “poor representation of Shakespeare.”1