Is this the real face of Henry VII? Westminster Abbey is hoping to finally find out
For hundreds of years historians have marvelled at the effigy of King Henry VII for being both lifelike and beyond the craftsmanship of its era – and have longer wondered how it was achieved.
The most prominent theory for its creation dates back to the 1980s, when it was claimed that an Italian Renaissance sculptor used a death mask to replicate the intricate details of Henry's face.
Westminster Abbey now hopes to finally lay the mystery to rest by rescanning the effigy head, which is the last surviving element of the effigy, using the latest, high-tech 3D scans. It was last scanned four decades ago using far less advanced technology.
The lifelike funeral effigy head of Henry VII, the father of Henry VIII and founder of the Tudor dynasty, is considered one of the finest of its kind to have survived to the present day. It is one of the most popular items on display in the Abbey's museum, The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries.
Experts believe its sophistication reflected the growing skill of royal portraiture in Renaissance England, where effigies were typically carried at royal funerals between the 14th and 17th centuries.
Previous research concluded that it was likely to have been made from a death mask, where wax or plaster was placed over the face and body of the deceased following their death in order to create a cast from the corpse.
The head will now be scanned by ThinkSee 3D, a digital heritage studio, with the aim of resolving the long-standing mystery once and for all. The firm has been scanning artefacts, art, natural history specimens and fossils for over a decade.
The studio will use a technique called photogrammetry, where hundreds or thousands of photos are merged into a digital 3D model with incredible detail.
It is hoped the findings, due to be shared later this year, will shed further light on the connection between the effigy and the work of Italian Renaissance sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who is thought to have arrived in England from Florence in around 1509-10.
Henry VII died on April 21, 1509 after suffering from gout and asthma. He was born in Pembrokeshire Castle in 1457 and was raised by his mother and uncle, with his father dying before his birth.
He spent several years in exile in France, returning in 1485 with an army and defeating Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth to claim the throne.
This victory marked an end to the Wars of the Roses and ushered in an era of peace and prosperity which saw the monarchy's wealth grow. Lavish sums were spent on building projects, including work at the Abbey's Lady Chapel, where Henry VII's body lies in a vault beneath a tomb alongside his wife, Elizabeth of York.
They were the first monarchs to be buried in the Abbey in a vault under the floor rather than in the tomb chest above ground. The tomb was made of marble and gilt bronze and also designed by Torrigiano, who was employed by Henry VIII.
The entire effigy, which stood at 6ft 1in, was carried on top of Henry VII's coffin during his funeral. It was made of straw and wood with a padding of hay covered with canvas and then plaster.
However, it was saturated by water during the blitz in the Second World War and disintegrated, leaving only the head intact. The nose, which had been lost previously, was also reconstructed after the war.
The tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, as well as a terracotta bust of Henry VII by Torrigiano in the V&A's collection, are also being scanned for the project.
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The Countess of Wemyss, trepanning enthusiast who researched the medical benefits of psychedelics
The Countess of Wemyss and March, better known as Amanda Feilding, who has died aged 82, spent decades as a lonely voice crusading for the legalisation of LSD and its rehabilitation as a medical treatment, and claimed that the war on drugs had caused 'more suffering worldwide than any other act'. Once ridiculed as 'Lady Mindbender' or the 'crackpot countess of Brainblood Hall', she lived to see her life's work vindicated in the 'psychedelic renaissance' of recent years, with acid microdosing now evangelised in Silicon Valley and psychedelics heralded by regulators as a breakthrough in treating severe depression. When Amanda Feilding first encountered LSD in the mid-Sixties, she discovered with her friends that small doses – enough to feel 'sparkly' but not high – sharpened their faculties, helping them to win at the Chinese strategy game Go, or bowl better in cricket. 'We used to call it a psychovitamin,' she recalled. But the international flourishing of medical research into LSD was squashed in 1968 when a panicked US government classified psychedelics as 'Schedule 1 substances', designated as having the highest potential for abuse, and no medical value whatsoever. This anti-psychedelic backlash would last until the late 1990s, a combination of stigma and prohibitive red tape putting off any serious scientist interest. During those decades Amanda Feilding's campaign on behalf of psychedelics – 'the flesh of the gods' – was largely pursued through art, which she admitted was 'an uphill struggle'. It did not help that she was easily characterised as a batty aristocrat, living in her family's triple-moated Tudor hunting lodge, Beckley Park, which lent her pronouncements on legalising drugs a touch of 'de haut en bas'. She was also given to unguarded comments such as: 'I have always considered myself my own best laboratory.' As the Daily Mail once asked: 'Is the countess just an amusing and irrelevant eccentric? Or could she be a real danger to society?' But perhaps the greatest hindrance to her credibility as a drug policy reformer was that, between the 1960s and the 1990s, she had been more visible as a trepanning enthusiast, who in 1970 was filmed in a floral shower cap, boring a hole into her shaven skull with a dentist's drill to create more room for blood to pulse through her brain. She then ate a rare steak to replace the lost iron and went out to a party in Chelsea. The resulting documentary, Heartbeat in the Brain, was later screened in New York, where – as one reviewer put it – the fainting audience members could be seen 'dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums'. 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Amanda Claire Marian Feilding was born on January 30 1943, the fourth child of Basil Feilding and his wife – and distant cousin – Margaret (Peggy), née Feilding; both were descended from the Habsburgs, and from two illegitimate children of Charles II. Amanda's early life was reminiscent of I Capture the Castle: money and fuel were forever running out, while she ran wild in the topiaried garden, her greatest delight being to coax laughter out of her private god: 'that kind of orgasm experience that I think a lot of young children have and then forget'. Her father, a great-grandson of both the Earl of Denbigh and the Marquess of Bath, farmed at night so that the day could be free for painting. 'Violent-tempered, very eccentric, charming and mercurial,' he had an anarchist temperament, and advised her: 'Whatever the authorities or the government tells you to do – do the opposite.' 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Yahoo
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