Forensic methods to reconstruct the face of the author of Divina Commedia

Jan 12, 2007 11:34 GMT  ·  By

The face of the author of "Divina Commedia" (The Divine Comedy) was brought to light by Italian researchers, 700 years after his death.

Dante Alighieri is considered the master of the Italian language and Divina Commedia one of the last and greatest literary statements produced during the Middle Ages, and one of the first of the Renaissance.

The results came with some surprises, particularly about the shape of his renowned aquiline nose. "It was a surprise for me too," said Professor Giorgio Gruppioni, an anthropologist at the University of Bologna's campus in Ravenna, the Adriatic city where Dante is buried.

The project showed that Dante most likely did not possess a hooked nose but pudgy one; and crooked rather than straight, almost as many pugilists have. "We all had our ideas of what Dante looked like. But if this is right, it shows his face was different," he said. "He looks more like a common man, a man on the street."

The popular concept of Dante's face has always been determined by the artists' imagination. Most portraits were made after 1321, the year of his death, and were posthumous "psychological renditions" of the way artists believed his face should look. Numerous "death masks" were supposed to be Dante's, but they are mostly regarded as sculpted after his death. "No human face could stand having 30 death masks made from it," Gruppioni said.

The work was made on calculations of Dante's skull realized by Professor Fabio Frassetto in 1921, the only period when it has been taken off from its crypt. Frassetto got precise measurements and a secretive plaster model, as authorities in Ravenna considered that a model of the skull would be a profanation.

The jawbone was not found in the crypt believed to be Dante's, so it was imagined. The skull reconstruction was carried on by engineers Francesca de Crecenzio, Massimiliano Fantini and Franco Persiani of the University of Bologna at Forli. Computer technology and forensic methods gave light to Dante's face. "It was the closest we could come to it," Giorgio Gruppioni said. "We put no expression on the face, just its form."

"When we finished with it, he looked more ordinary, like the guy next door. I thought this would have caused a scandal but most people think this is more human," he said.

Dante's remains were hidden by the monks in Ravenna from 1509 to 1865, as they feared that Florence agents would steal them.