Really?  They haven't changed the basic muscle or cartilage except
possibly for the width of the nose bridge.  What they have done is
to shape a facial expression and haircut that Bach could never have worn.
They've given him the typical "puzzled dumb white guy" expression seen
on the husband in every TV sitcom, and they've given his hair a buzzcut
that was physically impossible before the invention of the Wahl trimmer;
a buzzcut that happens to be popular right now among sexually ambiguous
European males.

This is just silly.[

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,3157170,00.html?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf](http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,3157170,00.html?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf)

Glad to know somebody cares!

His Bach is worse than his Byte ? :)

Have you been hanging out with Dr. Geep Phil?

 Creepy. Where is Bach's skeleton?

"Experts in Germany"?

Experts of what? Experts at Nothing Better to Do?

"...have reconstructed Bach's face from his skeleton."

I wasn't aware Bach's skeleton was just lying around offering itself up for scrutiny. Did he donate it to science or something? Or is this just what happens to really famous people in Germany? ;-)

He looks kind of like William Shatner now.

Hi Ockham and I care.

I agree they are trying to 'spin' him in that realization.

Bach was not sexually ambiguous. He fathered 20 children with two wives. Moreover, he was not puzzled or dumb. He knew his bliss, he followed it all his life, he produced a prodigious output and his work is monumental.

If one examines the Prelude in C from from the first page of the Well-Tempered Clavichord, the entire chordal canvas of Western music can be found, including jazz chords and the dissonances of the 20th Century.

Ockham you are perceptive in the deception perpetrated on Bach in that effort, a typical attempt at deconstruction and de-valorization of a true hero of Western Culture.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

::::: Opera :::::

Oh, please.

There's exactly one portrait that gives an idea of what Bach is supposed to look like, wearing a wig, and, as the article referenced pointed out, it looks a lot like other portraits of other men the same artist did, basically how some comic artists draw the same male and female face and you can only tell them apart by costume and hair.

Getting bent out of shape because of a reconstruction, sheesh.

we will get bent if we want to.

Depends on how far....I'm getting pretty old....heheh

oh look... I have " a buzzcut that happens to be popular right now among sexually ambiguous
European males."

..my wife must be suprised...

Quote - oh look... I have " a buzzcut that happens to be popular right now among sexually ambiguous
European males."

..my wife must be suprised...

I was about to say the same.  About my missis, that is.  Not yours. :biggrin:

Quote - we will get bent if we want to.

I was going to suggest exactly that...

If I had to wear one of the wigs that was fashionable at the time, I'd want a nice short haircut (but it's more likely that they've assumed he was subject to male pattern baldness given his apparent age in the painting).

it's not a couple of experts with nothing better to do than recreating bachs face that troubles me, but the legion of experts with nothing better to do than inventing more efficient weapon-systems, which seems to be widely considered as normal and useful.

"we will get bent if we want to."

Ha-ha-ha-ha.

It think his wiffle is really lame.  Aside from the fact that I think it was the style to either have long hair, because it got cold in Germany 250 years ago, or because it was easier; I bet Bach could have afford himself a decent wig, to boot.

He looks a little too Mediterranean for German named Sebastian, in that pick; what's a wholesome Greek name, we can refer to this image as?

Quote - If I had to wear one of the wigs that was fashionable at the time, I'd want a nice short haircut (but it's more likely that they've assumed he was subject to male pattern baldness given his apparent age in the painting).

Unless there's some way of determining whether or not he suffered from typical male pattern baldness from the skull, or maybe even from DNA, it's likely they just guessed, based on average statistics.
Maybe they have a foolproof way of determining that - I don't know.
I, however, am a 43 (just about 43 ) year-old male with no signs of baldness or even receding hairline. In fact, my hair is more than halfway down my back, and pretty much all over the place, front and back... at times I WISH it would recede, since I feel bad cutting it. ;-)
My point is, age only implies what's likely, not necessarily what's true.

Quote - it's not a couple of experts with nothing better to do than recreating bachs face that troubles me, but the legion of experts with nothing better to do than inventing more efficient weapon-systems, which seems to be widely considered as normal and useful.

Weapons are normal and useful.
Long, long history of that sort of thing... it's tragic when the bad guys use them, but pretty cool when the good guys do. Gotta see it in perspective though - a world without weapons is like a world without humans. ;-)

Actually, in a number of period dramas I've seen through the years, it's not uncommon for men of that time to wear their hair short and not particualrly well-kempt under the wig, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it kept the head cooler than having, in effect, two heads of hair insulating the top of their head. And secondly, the wigs were often filled with lice and other adorable creepy-crawlies, and keeping their own hair short was a means of preventing them fro transferring over onto their head.

As to the suggestion that they're trying to make Bach sexually ambiguous... not only is that a gross stereotyping of the type of people who might wear that hairstyle these days (I'm not one of them, but I hate to hear such generalisations paraded), but it's also a prepostorous claim that that was even remotely the intent of the reconstructing team. Besides, even if - in some twilight zone version of this world I live in - that hairstyle was solely reserved for those of a 'sexually ambiguous' manner (and for gods' sakes, why not just come out and say what you mean, instead of using hideous faux PC terms like that? but I digress...), then who is to say that that was its cultural signifier in Bach's period?

And for the record, I can see that there are differences between the two faces. It's hard to judge properly, since they're at different angles; and there's nothing I can point to specifically, since a) they're all quite subtle taken individually, and b)I'm not an expert on anatomy to be able to actually name them correctly; but the overall effect is to produce a face and identity which is different enough from the artist's impresion that we have to be of interest.

JonTheCelt

I don't know many women with buzz cuts....so how does that make him ambiguous ??  Now if they had him in a pair of tight jeans, with t-shirt and short black hair that is long in the front that hangs over his eyes..a little lip gloss...you know...kinda emo looking...but old and chubby....that might be more ambiguous...oh oh...and a little set of sparkling earrings would be cute too....

Sorry, just being me,
Rebekah

It's simple, really.
They make Bach look sexually ambiguous and through doing so, advance their anti-Western agenda.
Somehow, I guess making Bach look  "sexually ambiguous" furthers the cause of... of... I dunno, the decline of civilization, the collapse of moral values, and the end of the West.

Well, maybe not.
Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Pachelbel were all pretty good, too, so if society's mores is going to be forced into collapse through the identity slander of classical musicians, it's likely to take a while. ;-)

Attached Link: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/biocentre/uafa_cmw.htm

The article does mention which aspects have been drawn from artistic sources.

Bach had what, 17 or 23 children? Ambiguity I doubt (but then it gets cold in Prussia, especially in the early 1700s, the little Ice Age was still going on..;)

Obviously they didn't have the skeleton of his wig...;)

Also, painters of that and earlier periods would often 'Photoshop'  irksome facial deformities from paintings (after all, you want to get paid..;). The one noted exception to this was Oliver Cromwell, who wanted his portrait painted, 'warts and all' (hence the expression).

Well I think back then, the wigs they wore was to cover up the fact that they had to shave their heads due to lice as well as it was very fashionable to wear those wigs and we all know how far people go to be in the updated fashion. Possibly too as their hair fell out due to the lead poisoning in makeup, men wore that white "foundation" as much as the women. As well as poisioning from the pewter containers used to eat with and drink out of.

Along with what Pakled mentioned, back then you risked your life if you painted someone as they really looked. The only people who got their portraits done were wealthy, if you messed up and gave the daughter the hooked nose she has in real life, you were out of a job or worse, if the daughter was royalty you might have been sent to a dungeon and never heard from again. I think it was Anne Cleeves one of Henry VIII's wives, she apparently did **NOT **look like her portrait when she and Henry met. So maybe her father pushed the artist to paint a picture of what he wanted since a royal wedding was at stake...I don't think I would have risked painting her as she looked if that was the case.

I remember years ago when there was a lot of press about a 3d Marilyn Monroe. It didn't look anything like her execpt for the same hair and red lips.

Oh well. :)

Wigs were often worn over short cut hair. Age and weight have a lot to do with such things too.

This reminds me of a rather daft television series in the UK, called "Meet the Ancestors".   It was presented by a professional archaeologist and the format in every case involved his turning up (invited) on an archaeological site somewhere in Britain or Ireland, where human remains were being uncovered.   Invariably, even if what remained of the skull were only a lower left molar and a lump of jawbone, face-reconstruction experts in London would be asked to create a reconstruction of the face of the deceased.   Producing a face became the object of the exercise, at the expense of providing much more interesting information about how people lived in bygone times.

When face-reconstruction was still a bit of a novelty, a couple of British universities collaborated with Greek archaeologists on finds from a site called Verghina, in northern Greece.   As reconstruction proceeded, all concerned became convinced that the skull on which they were working was that of Philip II, king of Macedon, best known as the father of Alexander the Great.  There were all sorts of big clues in that direction from the archaeological site;  the fact that the owner of the skull had survived losing an eye, as Philip is known to have done, made Philip a decent candidate.   The final result came out looking a fair bit like the head of Zeus on Macedonian tetradrachm coins from the fourth century BC, which had always been assumed to have been based on an idealised portrait of Philip, anyway;   when it came to the finishing touches, especially the beard, those reconstructing the face possibly used the tetradrachm head as a cue, which potentially amounted to something of a circular argument. 

I rather like the idea that we probably know approximately what Philip looked like, thanks to the reconstruction from the Verghina skull.   I don't think that there is any reason to doubt the accuracy of the reconstruction, before the addition of facial hair.  In contrast, many of the ancient "portraits" that we have are assigned on a very flimsy basis and even those that can be confidently identified may date from well after the death of the individual portrayed (for that matter, Philip's coins were minted for decades after he was gone, as were Alexander's).    Ultimately, though, having a likeness of a figure from history doesn't tell us a huge amount about him or her.   Skeletons lack the essential spark of life.

Portraits may capture that spark, or they may not.    We can't tell, once the subject is lost to us.   In the case of Bach, we are asking whether one artist, in oils, has captured the essence of another, one of the greatest of musicians.   It's safe to say that no scientific reconstruction of Bach's head is going to shed any light on his genius.   On the other hand, if we lacked any inkling as to his appearance, his genius would remain undiminished.

From the article:

"As far as we can ascertain, this is how Bach would have looked," Wilkinson said.

'Nuff said. No one's implying it's a perfect reconstruction, just an educated guess based on the technology we have available.

Insofar as the other arguments against it -- that his short hair makes him look like a metrosexual, that he has the "dumb father" look -- please, people: get a real life, okay? The hairstyle is appropriate for middle aged men in the 1940s -- did that make all of them "sexually ambiguous"?

Sheesh.

Bach's hair would almost certainly have been cropped very short, if not shaved completely, as this was de rigeur at that time in order to wear the elaborate, heavy wigs that were a vital part of a gentleman's wardrobe.

Ockham's view that "a buzzcut ... popular right now among sexually ambiguous European males" is pretty far off target. Many of my best friends have buzzcuts, and very few of them are 'sexually ambiguous'. Not even the gay ones.

Oh, I get it, 'sexually ambiguous' means that the actual gender is in question, so some element of cross-dressing is implied, which also involves elaborate, heavy wigs, which is where I came in, so.... it all makes sense!

the person responsible for the final look of the entire reconstuction and illustration from it is the one who who invested it with "the spark of life," since, yes, you can't get that from a skull.

This artist chose to take the basic provided base (bone structure and muscles) and give Bach a bewildered, all-at-sea, slightly 'pained by life' and yes to use Ockham's phrase the puzzled "dumb white guy" expression. That was totally a choice of the artist; it did NOT come from the skull. His expression reminds me of Paul Dooley's character in "Sixteen Candles."  The confused dad at the mercy of events.

And speaking for myself only, not Ockham, THAT is the objection. Would the composer of the St. Mathew Passion, The Brandenburg Concertos, The Well Tempered Clavichord and thousands of other majestic compositions have likely had a stupid look on his face?

It would be a passing piece of idiocy, but this thing is going to be put in a museum where young people will see it and now have impressed in their memory forever that Bach looked like a silly nobody.

Would a silly nobody have written this?
http://www.rozhlas.cz/d-dur/download/10_track.mp3
or this:
http://www.rozhlas.cz/d-dur/download/13_track.mp3

What Post-modernists do as second nature is to deconstruct the face of a giant and replace it with that of a dolt. They don't like us to see 'majestic' and 'exhaulted' and 'intensely, seriously devoted to a vision." They don't want us to valorize heros.

::::: Opera :::::

Note: the above track is from a site generously posting the entire Brandenburg Concertos played on period instruments. If you want to know the giant who was J.S. Bach, I suggest you go here:
http://www.rozhlas.cz/d-dur/download_eng

hmmm... let's see. Am I going to go with a painting by someone actually looking at the guy, or an iffy reconstruction from an expressionless skeleton? A painting can capture so much more than physical reproduction, so guess we'll go with the painting. The other looks like a mug shot.

Such an evil conspiracy!
Where will it end?!
Who's next??!!
Before you know it, someone will try this out with Jesus or Moses or St Peter or da Vinci, or even Sir Isaac Newton! And we'll never be able to respect any of them again!
We're in for some rough times ahead...

I guess it would be heresy to say that maybe Bach did have a slightly dumb white guy look? Heck, anything's possible.

Insofar as the painting, if you read the article, it says that this one is little different from other faces painted by the same artist. Sorta like using V4's "Candy" morph versus the "Bonnie" morph: probably not a whole lot of difference.

But whatever the artist did in her "spark of life", she did her own impression and takes responsibility for that -- again, see the article. No one's claiming this is a definitive look, just a possibility. And given that she probably knows what she's doing, even with all the guesswork, I think I'd trust it sightly more than the painting, which was apparently churned out by some hack. But who knows: maybe both of them are wrong and Bach looked like... well, just some guy. Gosh. How scary.

Truly, this has to be one of the most inane threads going in here in a long time. I'll leave it at that. Discuss amoung yourselves.

Actually, the artistic license taken by the archaeologist was more along the lines of the depth of wrinkles, skin coloration and so on. What she almost certainly did not do is attempt to give the model any sort of expression. Models such as these are simply extrapolations from the skeletal data, either built up by hand through the use of clay, or computer-generated as this one is. It is not the place of the scientist/technician to give it any 'spark of life' as you put it.

In fact, most of the artistic choices that were taken for this model used the painting as a direct reference - you can see this most clearly in the skin coloration, as it is almost a direct lift of the portrait.

All this is completely ignoring operaguy's bigoted assumption that anyone who looks like an idiot, is an idiot, and no-one who create works of beauty and genius could possibly look at all bemused or less than fully aware. Rather than attacking people for creating expressions that they never chose, or because we perceive the aesthetics of a given look to have certain connotations, how about learning a little more about the technology and science behind the subject before offering your 'educated' diatribes?

JonTheCelt

any thread with links to the Brandenburg Concertos cannot be innane.

::::: Opera :::::

His body can be 'regular'. The structure of his facial bones can be ordinary. He can wake up some morning and look slack and unfocused. Some people not knowing him might mistake him for a dullard.

But the soul that created these compositions and set the foundation for Western music? No matter how ordinary his bones, that face will be full of intense joy, profound sorrow and exhaltation many many times in its life. Why didn't the responsible people take the recreated structure of the face and put THAT expression on him?

I am aware of the reconstruction process. An attempt to create 'no expression' is a choice...to show him expressionless and without soul. And anyway, all attempts fail, because the final artist puts "something' there, in this case a default cultural icon.

Moreover, I state once again, this is being enshrined at a museum. People viewing will not 'get' that it is a lifeless, meaningless, arbitrary, void, soulless piece of a forensic experiment, even if it says that in big posters all around it, even if the painting artist signs an affidavit  that her interpretation of the expression is completely arbitrary with no basis. (she did a poor job of picking up anything from the former painting.) They will think that "This Is Bach", gee he is pretty ordinary and silly.

JonTheCelts obnoxious post is rejected on all counts, with emphasis.

::::: Opera :::::

and with the flames brewing, I bow out.

y'know...I could be wrong about this, but I seem to remember that until Mendehlsson came along and popularized him, Bach was considered an obscure Prussian court composer, not very well known. Still, the genius is there...

So all the death masks of the world, through Madame Tussaud's lifetime, and in various musems throughout the world, are completely worthless because they fail to show any expression or life in the person's face? Because that's what we're looking at here, essentially - a computer-generated death mask.

And considering you actually responded to my post by regarding the lack of expresion, and the possibility that a genius may look ordinary, suggests you cannot and did not reject it out of hand. I apologise if by using the word 'bigoted' I thus caused my entire post to become worthless. But besides that one word, I fail to see how anything I said was obnoxious. I'll watch my choice of phrasing in the future.

JonTheCelt

OK.

Yes, I have always thought death masks useless.

Now on the wax museums? Those are 'stunts.' I have no problem with people enjoying them. I have not been to Trossoud's, but from video visits I've seen, I'd say they attempt to get a likeness, including clothing, and they impart some sort of mild expression. They usually don't go for radical expressions of poses.

Sculpture is something different. The artist is imbued with craft and knowlege of the human body, the more exquisitely tuned the better. But then, in execution, the artist choses a pose and an expression that conveys something. The entire gamut of human experience is his to choose from. I suppose, especially in the 20th century, the artist can even choose to convey 'a soul who has lost his soul,' in otherwords a nearly desolate person.

My point all along is that people visitng a museum see a bust of Bach and they immediately react as if it were art. They are looking for meaning. We are all trained to look for meaning in the human face. There are more muscles in the human face than all other muscles elsewhere in the body, combined [fact check needed, i have not checked that, just read it somewhere or on Jeapardy]. Evolution has taught us to read faces, searching for danger and attraction. We are attunded to the slightest tension, stress, relaxation, guardedness, willingness, etc.

If the forensic recreation is put on display, so be it. I think they should have some sort of written explanation that it is deliberately expressionles, as you said, the equivelant of a death mask. I also wish they had commissioned more than one artist to interpret in 2D, including at least one who would have attempted to match the visage with the majesty of the music.

::::: Opera :::::

... that picture looks like Dusty Rhodes from the old WWF days.

Quote - and with the flames brewing, I bow out.

Let's just put it this way to be clear...

If there are any flames, backsides will be kicked.  So keep it civil, boys and girls.

We are being civil already. There's a difference between strong objections and incivility.

Quote - We are being civil already. There's a difference between strong objections and incivility.

OG, I am absolutely not singling you or anyone else out.  Strong opinions are welcomed, as is - how's it go - "tough debate" (a phrase I dislike).  I am responding to the comment about "flames starting". 

FWIW, I see nothing in this thread to stir a baby from its sleep. 

It's pleasant to see people holding different opinions and being able to discuss them without trying to kill each other.  Makes a welcome change.  Already. :biggrin:

I think the problem resides in seeing the piece as two different things. I look at it and see it for what it is - a computer-generated death-mask, which allows us to see what the physical characteristics of the person were without giving us any idea of who the person was. As such, it has historical interest, and is worth showing in a museum. IT is possible others may look on it and see it as an attempt to recreate artistically the appearance of the great composer (and he as great, I have never disputed that). This, I think, is an erroneous assumption -if they had wanted such, they would have given the finished 3d model onto an artist to help give it the spark of life you so rightly say is missing. Whether the vieing public will see it or wat ti is or attempt to imbue it with some sense of meaning or narrative, I cannot say.

Incidentally, when I talked of Madame Tussaud, I was not referring to the tourist attraction in her name, but rather he humble beginnings of her work, which were a collection of waxen deathmasks taken from the famous and infamous. I too find the idea of waxworks attractions questionble at best, since they are attempting to create art and entertainment, and yet so often fail to give the figures they represent the spirit they require. But that is not their intention with Bach, I am sure - nor are they seeking, as you have claimed more than once, to devalue or devalorize the work of this great composer.

JonTheCelt

Regardless of the results, I am still amazed that the great man's skull was apparently within the gift of a museum, to hand out for this sort of exercise.   I suppose that it's double standards to say that it's all right to reconstruct a face from a skull when the skull's owner is unknown, or when the owner's identity is merely suspected, but not all right when the owner is rightly renowned, but I think that the passage of time is all-important.   There may be thousands of people alive today who are descended from the occupant of a Saxon grave from the time of King Aethelstan, but it's a safe bet that they won't know about it, so won't be bothered when that Saxon is turned into a lab report.   There must, surely, though, be living people who can claim J.S.Bach as a direct ancestor.  All those children and no descendants?

Archaeology is always going to be largely about burials.   Get used to the idea, if you are planning to get buried.   On the other hand, if you are an archaeologist reading this in the year 3008, check out the names "Brookwood" and "Kensal Green".   They should keep you busy.

Quote - any thread with links to the Brandenburg Concertos cannot be innane.

::::: Opera :::::

First time for everything... heh heh heh.

((Insults were a bit more civilized back in that day, apparently.  Perhaps I should start calling anyone who disagrees with me in a forum a "nanny-goat forumite".  Or perhaps "dirty dog" will suffice.  ))

Bach defended himself by drawing his dagger.

After completing his studies at Lüneberg, and a short tenure as violinist in the court orchestra at Weimar, Bach earned a post as both organist and choir director at the New Church in Arnstadt. During his four years there (1703-1707), his work as a musician was highly respected. As choir director, however, he was known for his short patience with less-than-able students. One evening, as Bach was walking across the marketplace with his cousin Barbara Catharina, a student named Geyersbach jumped up and came at him with a stick, claiming the teacher had insulted him earlier. When Bach denied insulting him, Geyersbach retorted that he had insulted his bassoon, and whoever insults his bassoon, insults him as well. The student then called Bach a dirty dog, or Hundsfott, and struck at him. Bach drew his dagger, and the two wrestled until other students present intervened.

*A court hearing shortly after found that Bach had indeed called Geyersbach a nanny-goat bassoonist, or Zippelfagottist, and he was reprimanded for doing so. A man must live among the imperfect, Bach was told, and the students and teacher must do their best with what they have.

*http://bachfest.uoregon.edu/bachground/bachbits/highlights.shtml

I wonder if Bach maintained a "bewildered white guy" look on his face as this event was transpiring?  I also wonder if his wig fell off of his head during the ensuing struggle?

Bach lived a hard life.  He was never able to fully enjoy fame in his own lifetime, largely thanks to jealousy from his superiors combined with his own sometimes difficult personality.  He also lived in a time when musicians still tended to be regarded by some as being mere servants to the nobility, and not as being worthy of any particular honor in their own right -- a holdover attitude from medieval courts: where the court musician was no different than the butler or the baker to his patron lord.

As for the 3D facial reproduction -- I dunno -- I tend to trust a contemporary eyewitness over a reconstruction done several centuries later.  It would be interesting to test these facial reconstruction experts by giving them the skull of a person of whom we have actual photographs from life, without showing the expert the photographs, and without telling the expert who the person was.  It would be enlightening to see what the reconstruction types could come up with, given that set of factors.

I have heard of at least one case where a murder was solved as the result of a facial reconstruction of the victim, using the victim's skull.  The reconstructed face was displayed on a crime television show, and someone that had known the murdered woman in life recognized the (until then) anonymous victim.

Heh -- it's thanks to Roman artistic realism that we now have an excellent idea of what the ancient Roman emperors actually looked like.  Nero was one seriously ugly man.  I wonder -- if they were able to locate Nero's skull -- if a modern 3D construction would look like his contemporary sculpture?

*A man must live among the imperfect, Bach was told, and the students and teacher must do their best with what they have.

*Man, oh man where we could go with that one..........

I tend to trust a contemporary eyewitness over a reconstruction done several centuries later

We dont really have the former, save in a painting that, as noted, is little more than a plug-n-play from a court painter's long-standing approach to such things. His "portrait" of Bach is, by all reports, little different from those he might have done of a hundred members of the court -- sort of like the galleries here, if you get my drift, :)

So, so what if the reconstruction looks a little bland or a little dull? Should she have made him look like SuperComposer, with a chiseled jaw and steely eyes and perfect hair and perfect skin? Wouldnt that have been just as disingenuous? Just having something like this, no matter how riddled with possible errors it might be, far outweighs having nothing at all. It may not be 100% historically accurate, but, heck, what has been?

Quote - Wigs were often worn over short cut hair. Age and weight have a lot to do with such things too.

True - doing so kept the lice to a minimum, because you could always get a new wig. Also, long hair is harder to keep clean when you bathe as infrequently as they did back then. Me, I think it's kinda cool - it puts a human face on him. IMHO, the expression is merely neutral. They did one (speculative, due to there being no skull) of Jesus awhile back, based on what were common DNA-based characteristics and social mores of that region during that period. It was pretty cool, and shattered the typical "tall blue-eyed white guy with long beard and flowing long hair" image entirely. This one of Bach wasn't nearly so surprising. Looks like an average guy for the area. /P

Ack -- it's just too bad that they didn't have digital cameras back then.  That would solve the argument.  But of course if they'd had digital cameras -- the technology probably would have changed so much by now that it'd be questionable as to whether or not we could retrieve the old original digital images.  Sort of like trying to find a drive to read a 1980's-era CD 300 years from now.  Highly doubtful that it'll be possible.

So maybe digital cameras in the 1600's wouldn't have solved the problem, after all.  Perhaps the 'carbon-copy' artist gave us something that has lasted longer than digital images would have.

IMO, this debate is one without a definitive answer.  Or at least the portion of the debate which pertains to what Bach actually looked like -- the cultural debate is a different matter.

From what I've read of Bach, he likely did have steely eyes.

In current-day sitcoms, the father is always the dumb one.  The mother isn't quite as dumb as the dad -- but even she's no match for her smarter-by-far-than-any-stupid-parent-or-adult children.

I suppose that it's always amusing to turn reality on its head.  Make the fictional world upside-down from the real one.  Where the problem comes in lies in the fact that some people are dumb enough to be influenced by the sitcoms into thinking that's how things actually are...........so why should they listen to their stupid parents, anyway?