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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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