03/15/2006
The Real George
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention two huge achievements in space announced last week. One, of course, is the amazing discovery by that intrepid spacecraft, Cassini, showing geysers on Enceladus, a tiny moon of Saturn. These geysers are shooting ice crystals out into space at heights dwarfing Old Faithful and may just possibly indicate the presence of liquid pools of water under the surface of the frigid moon. Scientists have been mystified by the presence of oxygen in the rings surrounding Saturn and now they seem to have the answer. It comes from the water emanating from Enceladus, only about 300 miles in diameter.
On Friday another spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, completed its seven-month journey to Mars and was successfully inserted into an elliptical orbit around the Red Planet. It joins three other spacecraft orbiting Mars and the two rovers still roaming about the surface of Mars. This orbiter has the most sophisticated equipment onboard and will be used to study Mars’ atmosphere as well as map more distinctly the surface of Mars, search for underground sources of water and photograph the surface in exquisite detail with its telescopic camera. While I wrote skeptically last week of the chances for a successful manned Mars landing, these plucky orbiters and rovers certainly will be crucial stepping stones should a manned mission ever succeed. When they finish their jobs, we’ll know the face of Mars almost as well as we know the face of our own planet.
However, let’s talk about the mapping of the face and features of quite a different object. Perhaps you recall seeing in the press some time ago pictures of reconstructions of the face and features of George Washington at various stages in his life. I was fascinated by an article in the February 2006 Scientific American describing how these images were constructed. The article, by Jeffrey H. Schwartz, was titled “Putting a Face on the First President”. Schwartz is a professor of anthropology and history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh. He’s also the forensic anthropologist for the Allegheny County coroner’s office and is no stranger to being presented with bones and reconstructing what kind of person belonged to said bones.
Well, Schwartz was approached by James Rees, executive director of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate to come up with life-size figures of Washington at three different stages in his life. The figures are to go on display in a new education center at Mount Vernon set to open later this year. The selected ages were Washington at 19, when he was a surveyor, at 45, the year of the terrible winter at Valley Forge, and at 57, when he was sworn in as our first president. However, for Schwartz there was a real challenge. Old George was not to be disturbed in his resting place; there would be no bones!
Schwartz was forced to use his anthropology expertise with art, three-dimensional scanning and computer techniques, studies of weird dentures, surviving clothing worn by Washington and detective work pulling together various bits of information. A key player was the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, who visited Mt. Vernon in 1785. Washington was 53 at the time and he insisted that Houdon not make the sculpture any bigger than life. Houdon had a reputation of being meticulous and purportedly used calipers to measure George precisely head to toe. Houdon produced three things, a full-length sculpture, a bust and a life mask of Washington.
Schwartz decided he had to scan these three objects and try to digitally superimpose the various images. Fortunately, he was familiar with PRISM, the Partnership for Research in Spatial Modeling, at Arizona State University and its director, Ashuman Razdan, agreed to help with the imaging. PRISM is noted for its projects involving computer scientists, engineers, sculptors and anthropologists. When the folks at PRISM scanned and superimposed the life mask and bust images, they matched so precisely, within 0.3 millimeter, that Schwartz was concerned. Supposedly, Houdon had done the bust freehand before the life mask was made. Schwartz concluded that Houdon had actually added eyes to the life mask and then made a cast of the life mask. The cast was the source of the bust.
Schwartz and his PRISM colleagues carefully measured some of Washington’s surviving clothing and found it to be consistent with measurements of Houdon’s sculpture. The clothing indicated George was a bit heavier than the sculpture and the digital Washington was adjusted accordingly. A bit of tweaking of the 53-year-old up to a more mature 57-year-old was accomplished using Schwartz’s expertise on the physical effects of aging. With the older Washington in hand, how to reverse the aging to come up with younger 47- and 19-year-old versions?
Here, portraits of Washington painted by the likes of Gilbert Stuart, Charles Wilson Peale and his son Rembrandt Peale, and John Trumbull proved helpful. Schwartz, however, had to be wary of artistic license. He learned, for example, that the hands on one Stuart portrait were most likely those of Stuart himself, while the body was a composite of three models who stood in for Washington. Washington, in his 60s, once posed for the two Peales together in the same sitting. Charles Peale produced a portrait of a healthy, pink-cheeked Washington while his son’s Washington was a haggard old man!
Of particular interest were portraits by Charles Peale of Washington in his 40s. Schwartz spent hours looking at them and realized that the nose-to-chin distance was significantly longer than in the Houdon sculptures. It was here that Washington’s well-known dental problems supplied a logical reason for the nose-chin discrepancy. In his 40s, Washington still had some front teeth and would have had more bone. Loss of these teeth later and the accompanying bone loss would account for a shorter nose-chin dimension. PRISM’s experts digitally adjusted the younger Washington accordingly.
Washington’s dental problems and his dentures were key items entering into Schwartz’s reconstructions at the different ages. Washington did not wear wooden dentures. This legend apparently got started when someone mistook stains in the ivory used to set the teeth in as wood grains when actually they were stains from eating, drinking and smoking over the years. I was shocked to read that a possible reason for some of Washington’s dental problems was his love of walnuts and the fact that he cracked the walnuts with his teeth! Ouch! He lost his first tooth in his 20s.
Only one complete set of dentures was available, that found in Martha Washington’s belongings. She didn’t wear false teeth so it was almost certainly George’s. It consisted of a flat lead plate and the upper teeth were a mix of horse or donkey and cow’s teeth while the lower teeth were human upper teeth and one carved from a nut! The denture was obviously unusable and was probably just used by Washington to fill his mouth when sitting for a portrait. No wonder he wasn’t smiling!
The available partial dentures were scanned and fit into the digital Washington and, to obtain some additional realism in lieu of missing upper dentures, part of the jaw of a British soldier of those times was scanned and manipulated to fit into the digital image. With a 47-year-old Washington in hand, Schwartz and crew could then go back to the 19-year-old George by adding some fat in the face, making adjustments for the increased number of teeth, shorten ear lobes and make other changes to reverse the effects of aging.
One thing I hadn’t known was that in upper class English families of those days, boys were corseted until they were five years old. This corseting had the lasting effect of pulling back the shoulders, puffing out the chest and pushing out the belly. Apparently, this accounts for the different looks of the portraits of our founding fathers and others of that time. They were different!
All in all, Schwartz and PRISM seem to have done a great job in constructing reliable likenesses of the real Washingtons. The figures that go on display will be quite lifelike and the faces of the older Washingtons will be consistent with Stuart’s description of Washington’s pale skin and grayish-blue eyes. I’m looking forward to a visit to Mount Vernon once again to meet the new additions.
Allen F. Bortrum
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