After Divine Comedy poet Dante Alighieri died in 1321, painters depicted him with a harsh countenance and an impressively pointed nose that not even his beloved Beatrice would have called handsome. But the representations may not reflect reality, according to a team of Italian anthropologists and facial-reconstruction engineers who recently created a 3-D version of Dante’s head.
Following the Manchester method of facial reconstruction, which extrapolates soft tissue from bone structure, the team used a computer to combine information from a plaster cast of Dante’s skull and from pictures and precise measurements made by a University of Bologna professor who was given permission to examine the poet’s remains in 1921, the only time his crypt has ever been opened.
The reconstruction shows a softer side of the man who wrote reams about infernos and levels of hell. With larger eyes, a rounder jaw, and a gentler expression, the new Dante ...
