LONDON — Nearly 400 years after his death, William Shakespeare appeared in a new and more handsome guise on Monday, thanks to a recently discovered portrait that a group of Shakespeare scholars and art historians said was the only known likeness to have been painted in his lifetime.
Stanley Wells, the chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, based in Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon, described the portrait at a news conference as a “pinup.” It shows the Bard as a far more alluring figure than the solemn-faced, balding image that has been conveyed by engravings, busts and portraits that have been accepted by scholars as the best available likeness of English literature’s most famous figure.
Is This a Shakespeare Which I See Before Me?
LONDON — Nearly 400 years after his death, William Shakespeare appeared in a new and more handsome guise on Monday, thanks to a recently discovered portrait that a group of Shakespeare scholars and art historians said was the only known likeness to have been painted in his lifetime.
Stanley Wells, the chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, based in Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon, described the portrait at a news conference as a “pinup.” It shows the Bard as a far more alluring figure than the solemn-faced, balding image that has been conveyed by engravings, busts and portraits that have been accepted by scholars as the best available likeness of English literature’s most famous figure.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/world/europe/10shakespeare.html?tntemail0=y&_r=1&emc=tnt&pagewanted=all