TED | Talks | Siegfried Woldhek: The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci? (video)
2008/04/01/1232RTFA: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/235
Leonardo Da Vinci’s life and work is well known — but his own face is not. Illustrator and activist Siegfried Woldhek used some thoughtful image-analysis techniques to find what he believes is the true face of Leonardo. Here, he walks viewers through exactly how he did it.
Siegfried Woldhek knows faces — he’s drawn more than 1,100 of them. Using sophisticated image…
Wow! This 4-minute video packs an amazing punch: the identity of Da Vinci. It’s a wonderful story that ties together several historic images, of and by Da Vinci. In the end of the day, of course, it’s a matter of choosing to believe Woldhek’s analysis or not…
But if Woldhek is right, then this constitutes astonishing reality-hacking. Da Vinci made himself into THE symbol of all humanity through his most famous self-portrait: The Vitruvian Man. The image perfectly and implicitly contains critical information about the proportions of the human body (ensuring its lasting utility in understanding humans), while simultaneously being conspicuously tagged in the most identifying way possible.
The Vitruvian Man isn’t just “some dude.” It’s Da Vinco, himself! It’s such an epic hack by virtue of lurking in obscurity for so many centuries, and by virtue of how deeply the image embedded itself into our culture. WOW.
Via boingboing.