Michelangelo’s “3D Face” Decoded
The Last Judgement, Sistine Chapel (Part II)
PART II: Michelangelo’s “3D Face” Decoded (click here to view the video), The Last Supper, Sistine Chapel
Continuing from Part I: Michelangelo’s “2D Face” Decoded (click here to view the video), this Thought Experiment takes the two dimensional sketch and Michelangelo’s original work, and uses Vizago to extrapolate three dimensional faces.
In high school, part of an Art History course that I took focused on Art in the Renaissance. One of the artists that we were asked to study was Michelangelo. I remember going to the Library, signing out a book that contained large photographs of the Sistine Chapel, and being in awe of Renaissance Art.
There was one photo in particular, “The Last Judgement”, that caught my eye. I remember getting “goosebumps” because I immediately saw a ghostly pattern of a “Skull” emerging from the photo. It was the way the two top “Angel” segments were positioned … they looked like eyes. The area where the central “Jesus figure” holds his arms up looked like the nose of a skull.
I had written about this on Evan William’s Medium (THE Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter), in which I was invited to contribute as a writer at http://medium.com/@danceScape.
In Googling, I discovered Will Smith (not the actor; it’s Professor William A.P. Smith, an expert in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition), and emailed him and explained my quest to find software that could extrapolate from the image of a skull that might be embedded in the painting. I asked if he was aware of a way for the some software to extrapolate what a FACE could look like from the skull. He recommended searching for Skull Face morphable model.
On Saturday, September 28th, I was inspired to take some tracing paper and draw what my eyes were decoding from the image. On Sunday, September 29th, I was able to use Vizago to model the head in 3D.
There has been nothing in the literature that I could find where this has been attempted before. Thanks to Professor William Smith for all his assistance, as well as Art Historian Simon Abrahams.
The resulting images surprised my wife, Beverley, and I.
Robert Tang
http://medium.com/@danceScape
www.lifencoded.com
Music Credit goes to my favourite music Artist, David Liang (The Shanghai Restoration Project), “Call Me Home”
