10 ms·

Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death

232 points by new_vienna 2y ago

ggm 2y ago
Hypothesised cranial haematoma after accident with tree, died aged 48. Reconstruction aligns with paintings, but it wasn't clear if the reconstruction model was informed by the paintings so somewhat meaningless they agree. Also the diagnosis isn't informed by the craniometry from what I can read: it's a reconstruction and an unconnected diagnosis from reports of his death. Amusingly a website which had (nc)register.com but not theregister.com..
- WorkerBee28474 2y ago
  From my understanding facial reconstruction from skulls is a well-defined process in forensics, so it's likely that they used standard methods. They mentioned getting colors (i.e. skin/hair tone) from painting.
  - ggm 2y ago
    I'd love them to have made more of that if the cranial reconstruction got close to the painting un-hinted.
  - biohcacker84 2y ago
    I'd love to see facial reconstruction of people of whom we have pictures and video. Since what I've heard of facial reconstruction is that there is a lot "art" in it.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      It would also be nice to see police sketch artist renderings compared with the people they depict. I've noticed that people rarely seem to see much value in testing procedures against questions with known answers.
    - jaggederest 2y ago
      I can tell you that, having seen some before, injured, and transplanted photos of facial transplant patients, their faces rapidly look much like they used to, regardless of the original person their face was transplanted from. Bone structure is, as far as I can tell as a layperson, the major determinant of how people look. I found it quite surprising as I thought it would be the other way around. The only obvious change was hair and skin color, essentially.
      - FartyMcFarter 2y ago
        > Bone structure is, as far as I can tell as a layperson, the major determinant of how people look. I found it quite surprising as I thought it would be the other way around. How would it work the other way around? You don't have a "look" before your bone structure exists right?
        jaggederest 2y ago
        Right, but naively I would think that your bones are the foundation and your skin and muscles are the house on top. But really, the skin and muscles are more of the paint and trim, and the bones are the foundation, walls, and even part of the roof. Even your nose is largely determined by the angle and width of your facial bones, which is quite surprising to me, given that obviously there's no bone in it past the bridge.
  - dkga 2y ago
    And probably the hair pattern as well.
  - vkou 2y ago
    > From my understanding facial reconstruction from skulls is a well-defined process in forensics It's commonly used, but is it: * Consistent from practitioner to practitioner? * Able to consistently pass a double-blind test? My understanding of forensic 'science' is that it has a bad reputation for having more in common with shamanism, or the rituals of a witchdoctor, than it does with science.
  - shakna 2y ago
    I can't really sum it up better than the Wikipedia page's author: > It is easily the most subjective—as well as one of the most controversial—techniques in the field of forensic anthropology.
- bananatype 2y ago
  [dead]
- pbh101 2y ago
  What’s amusing about two different sites being named ’Register’? It is a relatively common newspaper name suffix like ‘Times’ or ‘Post.’ Or is there something else I’m missing?
  - ggm 2y ago
    The one cited here most often would not be the national catholic register. I assumed it was thereg from a cursory look before clicking.
  - mdp2021 2y ago
    > being named ’Register’? It is a relatively common newspaper name Incidentally: The Times (The "Times of London", first with that name form), debuted on 1 January 1785, with the name The Daily Universal Register. Even "interchangable", you may (rhetorically) say.
caminanteblanco 2y ago
I wonder what the licensing related to the image reconstruction is. Like, am I able to use it for the cover of a biography of his I publish?
- robin_reala 2y ago
  It’s a creative work, so in most jurisdictions it’d be subject to copyright and unusable without licensing or the creator explicitly using a license like CC0 that allows free onward reproduction and reworking.
  - kbelder 2y ago
    Is it creative? If it's derived algorithmically from a collection of facts, it wouldn't be covered. I think this stuff is art with a little bit of informing from science, so it probably is creative, but I wonder what the authors would claim.
    - robin_reala 2y ago
      The skin tone and hair style are guessable, but not derived from the science, so definitely qualify as a creative act.
Mistletoe 2y ago
How accurate are facial reconstructions from skulls now? They don't seem that accurate in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_facial_reconstruction#/media/File:Gail_Mathews.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_facial_reconstruction...
darkwater 2y ago
So, they discarded the form of the face coming from iconography BUT used the colors like hair and skin. This is SO catholic (well, or religious in general).
- jjmarr 2y ago
  Aquinas was born in central Italy during the High Middle Ages. What hair and skin colour do you think he had?
  - madaxe_again 2y ago
    Italy had and still has a pretty diverse makeup - Germanic peoples from the north, North Africans from the south, and Mediterranean peoples who are the crossroads of the two. Where I live in the torturous mountains of the north of Portugal, people from villages all of five kilometres apart can look radically different. Our nearest village is your fairly standard Iberian phenotype - dark brown to black hair, and tanned looking. Across the valley is a village that took in Jews fleeing the inquisition - and they look Sephardic to this day. Ten kilometers north is a village still named in local dialect “Moorish village”, and lo and behold, the people there look Arabic. So what was his phenotype? Only going to find that out by sequencing him. He probably had dark skin and hair, but he could have been blonde and pale.
  - defrost 2y ago
    Was his family from the Northern or Southern Italian lines? Did his family include any of the many far off bloodlines bought into Italy via the Roman Empire creating far flung citizens? As the peer comment states, there's a wealth of pigments in Italy, and that goes back before the High Middle Ages. The earliest evidence of Italians' extraordinary genetic diversity dates back to the end of the last glacial period https://www.unibo.it/en/news-and-events/notice-board/the-earliest-evidence-of-italians-extraordinary-genetic-diversity-dates-back-to-the-end-of-the-last-glacial-period https://www.unibo.it/en/news-and-events/notice-board/the-ear...
  - paganel 2y ago
    Who knows? He might have been blonde-haired for all we know, after all the Duchy of Spoleto set up by the Lombards was also located in Central Italy. You can get an idea of that past Lombard presence from this map [1]: " Percentage of Blond Hair in the Italian regions" (notice the green blob East of Naples), which, granted, it may not be 100% scientific but I reckon that it is at least based on some real data. Later edit: Apparently that map is based on this mid-19th century data sample: Percentages of blond hair in the Italian regions (including Corsica). Data collected by Ridolfo Livi on 1859-1863 lever classes ( "Renato Biasutti - Races and peoples of the Earth - UTET, 1941") [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/62yyuz/percentage_of_blond_hair_in_the_italian_regions/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/62yyuz/percentage_...
michaelsbradley 2y ago
A weekly Summa Theologica reading group, attended by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, led by a professor with credentials in philosophy and theology, was one of the best experiences of my life: https://sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/ https://sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/
- f1shy 2y ago
  No matter what your beliefs are, if you seriously want to study philosophy, you have to go through it. Did something similar. It is great.
- TheFreim 2y ago
  There is also aquinas.cc which has the Summa Theologica as well as a variety of other works by St. Thomas Aquinas, with the Latin text on the left and English on the right. https://aquinas.cc/ https://aquinas.cc/
  - michaelsbradley 2y ago
    Very nice, thank you, I really like it and had not seen it previously!
dr_dshiv 2y ago
The first use of the word “android” comes from the discussion of a legendary mechanical talking head invented by Albertus Magnus. Thomas Aquinas couldn’t bear its babble and so he smashed it to bits. So, maybe he’s a patron saint of the anti-AI crowd? https://archive.org/details/b30337161 https://archive.org/details/b30337161
- gjm11 2y ago
  That link just goes to the whole book. For anyone curious: the relevant bit is on page 249, though some pages before and after provide interesting context. "The same thing is affirmed by [long list] of Albertus Magnus; who, as the most expert, had made an entire man of the same metal[1], and had spent 30 years without any interruption in forming him under several Aspects and Constellations. [...] and being put and fastened together in the form of a Man, had the faculty to reveal to the said Albertus the solutions of all his principal difficulties. To which they add (that nothing be lost of the story of the Statue) that it was battered to pieces by St Thomas, merely because he could not bear its excess of prating. But to give a more rational account of this Androides of Albertus, as also of the miraculous heads, [...]" [1] i.e., brass ("brazen heads" are mentioned earlier in the paragraph). (I've modernized the spellings.) So I think the Androides (I think this is intended as a Greek-looking singular title, not as an English plural; it's a translation of French "Androide") is meant to be a whole person, not just a talking head, although the book talks about it in the context of other things that were just talking heads. The author declines to believe that Albertus actually made a statue that was able to talk rationally. The specific reasons he gives aren't super-convincing to a modern reader, but I suspect they're mostly rationalizations and his real reason for being unconvinced is just that the story doesn't sound plausible. (Plus, he wants to acquit Albertus of the charge of doing magic in the treating-with-the-powers-of-evil sense.) He does say that statues able to make vaguely speech-like noises are surely possible "by the help of that part of Natural Magick which depends on the Mathematicks" :-).
  - dr_dshiv 2y ago
    Thanks for pulling that out! And apologies for my quick post. Another book you might like is “Mathematical Magick” by John Wilkins, one of the founders of the Royal Society [1]. In those days, quite a bit of scientific inspiration came from previous works on “natural magick.” There are many books like this at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam! [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Magick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Magick [2] https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en
sneak 2y ago
[flagged]
- cafeinux 2y ago
  What are you actually talking about here?
  - qwertox 2y ago
    That polytheism is "the truth"? Same mental gymnastics should apply here, though, according to his belief.
    - cafeinux 2y ago
      Thing is I didn't even read anything promoting either monotheism or polytheism, or anything of the kind. Yes, Catholics are in awe looking at that face they love, good for them, but paleontologists could just be in awe of the facial reconstruction of a neanderthal without them promoting any philosophy or religion... So I fail to see what are the mental gymnastics they are talking about.
  - sneak 2y ago
    The worship of saints. TFA: > He recounted that he reacted with “gratitude and emotion because Aquinas is someone that I’ve not only studied for a long time and taken as a teacher, but also someone I’ve grown to know and love as a saint — and as a spiritual master.” > “When I saw the reconstruction of his face, it was easier for me to imagine him as a real person who I can have a living relationship with; as a patron saint and as a guide,” he added.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  … Wait, would it break monotheism if Thomas Aquinas looked different? This feels largely irrelevant to monotheism, one way or another.
deleted 2y ago
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lqet 2y ago
> “Now, it could be that on the whole we’re a lot larger now than even overweight medievals were, or that St. Thomas was never the portly friar described by his legend,” Father Aquinas quipped, adding, “Regardless, the stories of St. Thomas’ size are probably exaggerated.” According to Martin Luther (who may have had an interest in discrediting him), Thomas Aquinas was able to devour an entire goose, and a piece of his dining table had to be cut out to accommodate his immense body [0] [0] https://books.google.de/books?newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&hl=de&id=ZfGGAAAAIAAJ&dq=thomas+aquin+tisch+loch&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=tisch https://books.google.de/books?newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&hl=de&...
- red_trumpet 2y ago
  Also, Luther was born ~250 years after Thomas Aquinas, so this could have already become legend.
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    Perhaps the most salient reason not to trust his description of the man: he never met Aquinas, nor met anyone who met anyone who met him.
- clarionbell 2y ago
  Yep, definitely not a slander there. I mean, why would Luther of all people have a problem with one of most important figures of Catholic scholasticism.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    Another aspect to consider is that St. Thomas was an O.G. Dominican friar, the order which was founded with a mission to answer the heresy of Albigensians and Catharists, who were going extreme ascetic, believing the human flesh and visible world were inherently evil, and ceasing to marry and bear children. The Dominicans wearing white and black answer that pleasures can be enjoyed in moderation, and were given by God to help ease our suffering and make life enjoyable, and it's not universally wrong to enjoy rich food, or start families and grow them. Or harness lightning and take minerals from the ground and make them into new things to serve or benefit the human world. So Aquinas' own confreres wouldn't be shy about describing his stoutness and ability to devour geese twice a year, and it wasn't for nothing that an army came later to massacre the adversaries and quell the heresy from spreading for a few hundred years. There were contagions to deal with and masks to be worn. Jubilee Years began again in the 14th century after Thomas and before Martin Luther. Jubilees are still decreed and proclaimed every 25 years, plus extras. Such as 1525: https://gcatholic.org/events/celebration/1524.htm#839 https://gcatholic.org/events/celebration/1524.htm#839 Francis I of France ran into trouble against Spanish Emperor Charles in those days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_I_of_France#Military_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_I_of_France#Military_a... 1925, 1950, 1975, 2000, etc. See Old Testament for examples among Hebrews and Judaica. Or listen to The Police's greatest hits: https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/The-Police/King-of-Pain https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/The-Police/King-of-Pain
beardyw 2y ago
People's faces are very rarely that symmetrical which raises doubt in my mind.
- ec109685 2y ago
  There isn’t enough accuracy in the reconstruction process to be sensitive to subtle asymmetries in someone’s face. It’d be completely making that part up.
  - beardyw 2y ago
    But isn't the symmetry just as much made up?
deleted 2y ago
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masswerk 2y ago
Isn't this reconstruction a bit on the slim side? Aquinas was reportedly, let's say, a man of portly presence. I can't find a scholarly source on the matter, at the moment, but here are two quotes I found on the website of a nun[1] (no less, so probably written in good faith): > St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet; very mild and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart from the humility of holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his occasional and carefully concealed experiences of trance or ecstasy. (G.K. Chesterton) > St. Thomas Aquinas was a compulsive over-eater who was not just fat but morbidly obese and physically grotesque. (Myron Shibley) [1] http://asksistermarymartha.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-fat-was-he-as-fat-as.html http://asksistermarymartha.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-fat-was-... (Fun fact, there's a reference to this in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, alluding to difficulties with the transport of the body over a staircase, which coincides with circumstances of G.K. Chesterton's passing, as described on that page.)
- ryukoposting 2y ago
  The article discusses this. The researchers admit they can't know for sure if they got that part right. On the other hand, standards for body size were very different 750 years ago than today, so that's certainly part of it. Legends tend to get more exaggerated over time, and the legend of Thomas Aquinas has had plenty of time for exaggeration to build up.
  - masswerk 2y ago
    I'm aware of this. But the article gives no reason for this choice. It's rather a "well, couldn't it be" hypothetical, provided as a quote: > “Now, it could be that on the whole we’re a lot larger now than even overweight medievals were, or that St. Thomas was never the portly friar described by his legend,” Father Aquinas quipped, adding, “Regardless, the stories of St. Thomas’ size are probably exaggerated.” This is certainly in stark contrast to the centuries-long traditional notion of Aquinas' appearance, which may require some further detail why and how this choice was made. – I can see why the quoted father Aquinas should be excited by this "angelic" appearance, but this may be hardly sufficient to motivate a scientific choice. Personally, I can't see how the size of the skull (the sole evidence) should or could correlate with body mass.
MiddleEndian 2y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/yj1gf2/whatcha_gonna_do_bruvthur/ https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/yj1gf2/whatcha_gonna...
penneyd 2y ago
Are there any examples of these types of reconstructions where the reconstruction has been performed blind on the skull of someone for which we have photos?
- 725686 2y ago
  I would also love to see this. I I'm very skeptic about this kinds of reconstructions based only on the remains.
- CobrastanJorji 2y ago
  Yes, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5931631/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5931631/ Note that the National Library of Medicine is hosted on NIH, and the administration has been scrubbing much of that content, so I think the link works now, but I can't promise that it will stay good.
wileydragonfly 2y ago
Let him rest. It doesn’t matter what he looked like. Accept his work as having value or reject it. Slinging his skull around is macabre and obscene.

232 points by new_vienna 2y ago

ggm 2y ago

Hypothesised cranial haematoma after accident with tree, died aged 48. Reconstruction aligns with paintings, but it wasn't clear if the reconstruction model was informed by the paintings so somewhat meaningless they agree. Also the diagnosis isn't informed by the craniometry from what I can read: it's a reconstruction and an unconnected diagnosis from reports of his death. Amusingly a website which had (nc)register.com but not theregister.com..

WorkerBee28474 2y ago
From my understanding facial reconstruction from skulls is a well-defined process in forensics, so it's likely that they used standard methods. They mentioned getting colors (i.e. skin/hair tone) from painting.
- ggm 2y ago
  I'd love them to have made more of that if the cranial reconstruction got close to the painting un-hinted.
- biohcacker84 2y ago
  I'd love to see facial reconstruction of people of whom we have pictures and video. Since what I've heard of facial reconstruction is that there is a lot "art" in it.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    It would also be nice to see police sketch artist renderings compared with the people they depict. I've noticed that people rarely seem to see much value in testing procedures against questions with known answers.
  - jaggederest 2y ago
    I can tell you that, having seen some before, injured, and transplanted photos of facial transplant patients, their faces rapidly look much like they used to, regardless of the original person their face was transplanted from. Bone structure is, as far as I can tell as a layperson, the major determinant of how people look. I found it quite surprising as I thought it would be the other way around. The only obvious change was hair and skin color, essentially.
    - FartyMcFarter 2y ago
      > Bone structure is, as far as I can tell as a layperson, the major determinant of how people look. I found it quite surprising as I thought it would be the other way around. How would it work the other way around? You don't have a "look" before your bone structure exists right?
      - jaggederest 2y ago
        Right, but naively I would think that your bones are the foundation and your skin and muscles are the house on top. But really, the skin and muscles are more of the paint and trim, and the bones are the foundation, walls, and even part of the roof. Even your nose is largely determined by the angle and width of your facial bones, which is quite surprising to me, given that obviously there's no bone in it past the bridge.
- dkga 2y ago
  And probably the hair pattern as well.
- vkou 2y ago
  > From my understanding facial reconstruction from skulls is a well-defined process in forensics It's commonly used, but is it: * Consistent from practitioner to practitioner? * Able to consistently pass a double-blind test? My understanding of forensic 'science' is that it has a bad reputation for having more in common with shamanism, or the rituals of a witchdoctor, than it does with science.
- shakna 2y ago
  I can't really sum it up better than the Wikipedia page's author: > It is easily the most subjective—as well as one of the most controversial—techniques in the field of forensic anthropology.
bananatype 2y ago
[dead]
pbh101 2y ago
What’s amusing about two different sites being named ’Register’? It is a relatively common newspaper name suffix like ‘Times’ or ‘Post.’ Or is there something else I’m missing?
- ggm 2y ago
  The one cited here most often would not be the national catholic register. I assumed it was thereg from a cursory look before clicking.
- mdp2021 2y ago
  > being named ’Register’? It is a relatively common newspaper name Incidentally: The Times (The "Times of London", first with that name form), debuted on 1 January 1785, with the name The Daily Universal Register. Even "interchangable", you may (rhetorically) say.

caminanteblanco 2y ago

I wonder what the licensing related to the image reconstruction is. Like, am I able to use it for the cover of a biography of his I publish?

robin_reala 2y ago
It’s a creative work, so in most jurisdictions it’d be subject to copyright and unusable without licensing or the creator explicitly using a license like CC0 that allows free onward reproduction and reworking.
- kbelder 2y ago
  Is it creative? If it's derived algorithmically from a collection of facts, it wouldn't be covered. I think this stuff is art with a little bit of informing from science, so it probably is creative, but I wonder what the authors would claim.
  - robin_reala 2y ago
    The skin tone and hair style are guessable, but not derived from the science, so definitely qualify as a creative act.

Mistletoe 2y ago

How accurate are facial reconstructions from skulls now? They don't seem that accurate in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_facial_reconstruction#/media/File:Gail_Mathews.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_facial_reconstruction...

darkwater 2y ago

So, they discarded the form of the face coming from iconography BUT used the colors like hair and skin. This is SO catholic (well, or religious in general).

jjmarr 2y ago
Aquinas was born in central Italy during the High Middle Ages. What hair and skin colour do you think he had?
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  Italy had and still has a pretty diverse makeup - Germanic peoples from the north, North Africans from the south, and Mediterranean peoples who are the crossroads of the two. Where I live in the torturous mountains of the north of Portugal, people from villages all of five kilometres apart can look radically different. Our nearest village is your fairly standard Iberian phenotype - dark brown to black hair, and tanned looking. Across the valley is a village that took in Jews fleeing the inquisition - and they look Sephardic to this day. Ten kilometers north is a village still named in local dialect “Moorish village”, and lo and behold, the people there look Arabic. So what was his phenotype? Only going to find that out by sequencing him. He probably had dark skin and hair, but he could have been blonde and pale.
- defrost 2y ago
  Was his family from the Northern or Southern Italian lines? Did his family include any of the many far off bloodlines bought into Italy via the Roman Empire creating far flung citizens? As the peer comment states, there's a wealth of pigments in Italy, and that goes back before the High Middle Ages. The earliest evidence of Italians' extraordinary genetic diversity dates back to the end of the last glacial period https://www.unibo.it/en/news-and-events/notice-board/the-earliest-evidence-of-italians-extraordinary-genetic-diversity-dates-back-to-the-end-of-the-last-glacial-period https://www.unibo.it/en/news-and-events/notice-board/the-ear...
- paganel 2y ago
  Who knows? He might have been blonde-haired for all we know, after all the Duchy of Spoleto set up by the Lombards was also located in Central Italy. You can get an idea of that past Lombard presence from this map [1]: " Percentage of Blond Hair in the Italian regions" (notice the green blob East of Naples), which, granted, it may not be 100% scientific but I reckon that it is at least based on some real data. Later edit: Apparently that map is based on this mid-19th century data sample: Percentages of blond hair in the Italian regions (including Corsica). Data collected by Ridolfo Livi on 1859-1863 lever classes ( "Renato Biasutti - Races and peoples of the Earth - UTET, 1941") [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/62yyuz/percentage_of_blond_hair_in_the_italian_regions/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/62yyuz/percentage_...

michaelsbradley 2y ago

A weekly Summa Theologica reading group, attended by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, led by a professor with credentials in philosophy and theology, was one of the best experiences of my life: https://sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/ https://sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/

f1shy 2y ago
No matter what your beliefs are, if you seriously want to study philosophy, you have to go through it. Did something similar. It is great.
TheFreim 2y ago
There is also aquinas.cc which has the Summa Theologica as well as a variety of other works by St. Thomas Aquinas, with the Latin text on the left and English on the right. https://aquinas.cc/ https://aquinas.cc/
- michaelsbradley 2y ago
  Very nice, thank you, I really like it and had not seen it previously!

dr_dshiv 2y ago

The first use of the word “android” comes from the discussion of a legendary mechanical talking head invented by Albertus Magnus. Thomas Aquinas couldn’t bear its babble and so he smashed it to bits. So, maybe he’s a patron saint of the anti-AI crowd? https://archive.org/details/b30337161 https://archive.org/details/b30337161

gjm11 2y ago
That link just goes to the whole book. For anyone curious: the relevant bit is on page 249, though some pages before and after provide interesting context. "The same thing is affirmed by [long list] of Albertus Magnus; who, as the most expert, had made an entire man of the same metal[1], and had spent 30 years without any interruption in forming him under several Aspects and Constellations. [...] and being put and fastened together in the form of a Man, had the faculty to reveal to the said Albertus the solutions of all his principal difficulties. To which they add (that nothing be lost of the story of the Statue) that it was battered to pieces by St Thomas, merely because he could not bear its excess of prating. But to give a more rational account of this Androides of Albertus, as also of the miraculous heads, [...]" [1] i.e., brass ("brazen heads" are mentioned earlier in the paragraph). (I've modernized the spellings.) So I think the Androides (I think this is intended as a Greek-looking singular title, not as an English plural; it's a translation of French "Androide") is meant to be a whole person, not just a talking head, although the book talks about it in the context of other things that were just talking heads. The author declines to believe that Albertus actually made a statue that was able to talk rationally. The specific reasons he gives aren't super-convincing to a modern reader, but I suspect they're mostly rationalizations and his real reason for being unconvinced is just that the story doesn't sound plausible. (Plus, he wants to acquit Albertus of the charge of doing magic in the treating-with-the-powers-of-evil sense.) He does say that statues able to make vaguely speech-like noises are surely possible "by the help of that part of Natural Magick which depends on the Mathematicks" :-).
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  Thanks for pulling that out! And apologies for my quick post. Another book you might like is “Mathematical Magick” by John Wilkins, one of the founders of the Royal Society [1]. In those days, quite a bit of scientific inspiration came from previous works on “natural magick.” There are many books like this at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam! [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Magick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Magick [2] https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en

sneak 2y ago

[flagged]

cafeinux 2y ago
What are you actually talking about here?
- qwertox 2y ago
  That polytheism is "the truth"? Same mental gymnastics should apply here, though, according to his belief.
  - cafeinux 2y ago
    Thing is I didn't even read anything promoting either monotheism or polytheism, or anything of the kind. Yes, Catholics are in awe looking at that face they love, good for them, but paleontologists could just be in awe of the facial reconstruction of a neanderthal without them promoting any philosophy or religion... So I fail to see what are the mental gymnastics they are talking about.
- sneak 2y ago
  The worship of saints. TFA: > He recounted that he reacted with “gratitude and emotion because Aquinas is someone that I’ve not only studied for a long time and taken as a teacher, but also someone I’ve grown to know and love as a saint — and as a spiritual master.” > “When I saw the reconstruction of his face, it was easier for me to imagine him as a real person who I can have a living relationship with; as a patron saint and as a guide,” he added.
rsynnott 2y ago
… Wait, would it break monotheism if Thomas Aquinas looked different? This feels largely irrelevant to monotheism, one way or another.

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lqet 2y ago

> “Now, it could be that on the whole we’re a lot larger now than even overweight medievals were, or that St. Thomas was never the portly friar described by his legend,” Father Aquinas quipped, adding, “Regardless, the stories of St. Thomas’ size are probably exaggerated.” According to Martin Luther (who may have had an interest in discrediting him), Thomas Aquinas was able to devour an entire goose, and a piece of his dining table had to be cut out to accommodate his immense body [0] [0] https://books.google.de/books?newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&hl=de&id=ZfGGAAAAIAAJ&dq=thomas+aquin+tisch+loch&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=tisch https://books.google.de/books?newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&hl=de&...

red_trumpet 2y ago
Also, Luther was born ~250 years after Thomas Aquinas, so this could have already become legend.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  Perhaps the most salient reason not to trust his description of the man: he never met Aquinas, nor met anyone who met anyone who met him.
clarionbell 2y ago
Yep, definitely not a slander there. I mean, why would Luther of all people have a problem with one of most important figures of Catholic scholasticism.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  Another aspect to consider is that St. Thomas was an O.G. Dominican friar, the order which was founded with a mission to answer the heresy of Albigensians and Catharists, who were going extreme ascetic, believing the human flesh and visible world were inherently evil, and ceasing to marry and bear children. The Dominicans wearing white and black answer that pleasures can be enjoyed in moderation, and were given by God to help ease our suffering and make life enjoyable, and it's not universally wrong to enjoy rich food, or start families and grow them. Or harness lightning and take minerals from the ground and make them into new things to serve or benefit the human world. So Aquinas' own confreres wouldn't be shy about describing his stoutness and ability to devour geese twice a year, and it wasn't for nothing that an army came later to massacre the adversaries and quell the heresy from spreading for a few hundred years. There were contagions to deal with and masks to be worn. Jubilee Years began again in the 14th century after Thomas and before Martin Luther. Jubilees are still decreed and proclaimed every 25 years, plus extras. Such as 1525: https://gcatholic.org/events/celebration/1524.htm#839 https://gcatholic.org/events/celebration/1524.htm#839 Francis I of France ran into trouble against Spanish Emperor Charles in those days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_I_of_France#Military_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_I_of_France#Military_a... 1925, 1950, 1975, 2000, etc. See Old Testament for examples among Hebrews and Judaica. Or listen to The Police's greatest hits: https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/The-Police/King-of-Pain https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/The-Police/King-of-Pain

beardyw 2y ago

People's faces are very rarely that symmetrical which raises doubt in my mind.

ec109685 2y ago
There isn’t enough accuracy in the reconstruction process to be sensitive to subtle asymmetries in someone’s face. It’d be completely making that part up.
- beardyw 2y ago
  But isn't the symmetry just as much made up?

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masswerk 2y ago

Isn't this reconstruction a bit on the slim side? Aquinas was reportedly, let's say, a man of portly presence. I can't find a scholarly source on the matter, at the moment, but here are two quotes I found on the website of a nun[1] (no less, so probably written in good faith): > St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet; very mild and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart from the humility of holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his occasional and carefully concealed experiences of trance or ecstasy. (G.K. Chesterton) > St. Thomas Aquinas was a compulsive over-eater who was not just fat but morbidly obese and physically grotesque. (Myron Shibley) [1] http://asksistermarymartha.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-fat-was-he-as-fat-as.html http://asksistermarymartha.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-fat-was-... (Fun fact, there's a reference to this in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, alluding to difficulties with the transport of the body over a staircase, which coincides with circumstances of G.K. Chesterton's passing, as described on that page.)

ryukoposting 2y ago
The article discusses this. The researchers admit they can't know for sure if they got that part right. On the other hand, standards for body size were very different 750 years ago than today, so that's certainly part of it. Legends tend to get more exaggerated over time, and the legend of Thomas Aquinas has had plenty of time for exaggeration to build up.
- masswerk 2y ago
  I'm aware of this. But the article gives no reason for this choice. It's rather a "well, couldn't it be" hypothetical, provided as a quote: > “Now, it could be that on the whole we’re a lot larger now than even overweight medievals were, or that St. Thomas was never the portly friar described by his legend,” Father Aquinas quipped, adding, “Regardless, the stories of St. Thomas’ size are probably exaggerated.” This is certainly in stark contrast to the centuries-long traditional notion of Aquinas' appearance, which may require some further detail why and how this choice was made. – I can see why the quoted father Aquinas should be excited by this "angelic" appearance, but this may be hardly sufficient to motivate a scientific choice. Personally, I can't see how the size of the skull (the sole evidence) should or could correlate with body mass.

MiddleEndian 2y ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/yj1gf2/whatcha_gonna_do_bruvthur/ https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/yj1gf2/whatcha_gonna...

penneyd 2y ago

Are there any examples of these types of reconstructions where the reconstruction has been performed blind on the skull of someone for which we have photos?

725686 2y ago
I would also love to see this. I I'm very skeptic about this kinds of reconstructions based only on the remains.
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
Yes, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5931631/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5931631/ Note that the National Library of Medicine is hosted on NIH, and the administration has been scrubbing much of that content, so I think the link works now, but I can't promise that it will stay good.

wileydragonfly 2y ago

Let him rest. It doesn’t matter what he looked like. Accept his work as having value or reject it. Slinging his skull around is macabre and obscene.