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Aktualisiert: 01.Dezember 2007 / updated: 01 December 2007

 

The True Face of William Shakespeare. The Poet's Death Mask and Likenesses from Three Periods of His Life (London: Chaucer Press, 2006).

e. Replies

GEO.de: „Genuine or not genuine?“ (Echt oder nicht echt?)- Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s Reply to Christopher Hudson, „The Real Shakespeare“, Sunday Times Magazine (5 February 2006), in:
GEO.de (14. Februar 2006)
[http://www.geo.de/GEO/kultur/geschichte/5071.html]

Whether the well-known likenesses of Shakespeare are genuine - this is a question Christopher Hudson deals with in his article „The Real Shakespeare“, Sunday Times Magazine (5 February 2006). Please read here the reply by the German Shakespeare scholar Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel.

To celebrate its 150th anniversary the National Portrait Gallery is opening an exhibition called “Searching for Shakespeare” on 2 March 2006. In preparation for the event, as Christopher Hudson reports in his article „The Real Shakespeare“ (Sunday Times Magazine, 5 February), the Gallery subjected to laboratory testing six images of the poet that laid claim to be true portraits of Shakespeare. For centuries, the appearance of the poet had been shrouded in mystery. Now, however, the tests supervised by the curator, Tarnya Cooper, are said to have brought clarity at last; they include x-ray and ultra-violet scanning, analysis of pigment, and radio carbon dating. According to Hudson’s report, based on the exhibition catalogue, the result was that of the six images investigated (the Grafton, Sanders, Soest, Janssen, Flower, and Chandos portraits), five failed to pass the tests. These five included the Flower portrait, a picture which, along with the Chandos portrait, is an extremely popular image of the poet.
We learn from the Sunday Times article that Tarnya Cooper is now able to pronounce a definitive verdict on the Flower portrait. Her test results are said to show that it was a fake, painted in the early 19th century. Analysis of the paint used has proved that it contains pigment, for example chrome yellow, not available to painters before 1814.
This negative verdict contradicts the findings concerning the authenticity of the Flower portrait to be published in my new book, The True Face of William Shakespeare: The Poet’s Death Mask and Likenesses from Three Periods of his Life. The book will be presented to the German public at a press conference at the City Hall of Darmstadt on 22 February 2006, and will be followed shortly by an English translation published by the Chaucer Press.
In collaboration with a former top forensic specialist from the German Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BKA) as well as an eminent Austrian expert on Old Masters, I have been able to clear up this discrepancy. The explanation is set out in a straightforward manner in an appendix to my book. Therefore I hold to the positive evidence presented in the main part of The True Face of William Shakespeare: the Flower portrait (1609), restored by the experienced picture restorer, Nancy Stocker, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1979, is a genuine and accurate true-to-life likeness of William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon, for which the poet must have sat personally.
It is commendable that Tarnya Cooper also had tests carried out on the no less popular Chandos portrait. Microscopic analysis of the paint used in this picture revealed “true colours“ from Shakespeare’s period. However, important though this finding undoubtedly is, it is unconvincing for the curator to claim on this basis, as the Sunday Times Magazine article has it, that the Chandos painting is a “true lifetime likeness” of the poet. All that the test has shown is that the portrait originated in Shakespeare’s lifetime, but not whom it depicts. The Grafton portrait, too, dates from Shakespeare’s time, but as Cooper explicitly states, it cannot claim to be authentic on those grounds alone.
By this point, if not before, it will have become clear that the tests carried out in the NPG’s laboratories did not focus on the essential question, namely that of the identity of the subject. Yet, particularly in the case of the Chandos portrait, this was the only real problem that remained to be resolved. Sir Roy Strong, a former director of the National Portrait Gallery, expressed it succinctly: “the identity of this as a portrait of Shakespeare remains non proven and is likely to remain so” (Tudor & Jacobean Portraits, 2 vols., London, 1969, I, 279).
In my new book I have been able to resolve this open question, among others. I have done so in co-operation with specialists from many disciplines, including experts from the German Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigation whose task it is to identify persons from images, by using the latest forensic technology, and medical experts who have diagnosed the same unmistakable symptoms of disease depicted in the Chandos and Flower portraits, at various stages of their development. It has thus been possible to identify the sitter of the Chandos portrait as William Shakespeare.


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