Aproximação facial de quatro crânios da coleção osteológica Luis Lopes

Tese de mestrado, Anatomia artística, especialização em Ilustração Científica, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas Artes, 2013The close relationship between the face and personal identity was acknowledged early on. From prehistoric burial rites to the academic exercises of the 19th century anatomists, various circumstances have compelled man to recreate faces from their hard substrate - the skull. The study of the correlations between the bony contours of the skull and the external facial features, for the purpose of recreating the individual’s countenance in vivo, is called Facial Approximation. The main purpose of this project was to create four facial approximations, based on the analysis of four skulls from the Luís Lopes Collection of human skeletons located at the Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência, University of Lisbon. The collection includes personal documentary data for each individual which, in some cases, include antemortem photos of the subjects. The visages were gradually elaborated through (1) the construction of the main muscle groups of the face (2) the deduction of the external features by the use of specific methodologies (3) the prediction of the facial boundaries by the application of soft tissue depth markers. Initially, the approximations were performed two-dimensionally, with graphite on tracing paper. These pictures served as a preliminary study for the construction of the final virtual versions modeled on a 3D digital sculpting software. Upon finishing all facial approximations, the ante-mortem photographs of the subjects were revealed. These data provided the opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of the approximations through direct comparison between them and the original faces, and through a survey developed for the purpose of assessing their reliability to promote the correct identification of the target individuals. The results suggest that the bony struture of the skull holds, to some degree, the pattern which defines the unique features of each face and that it is possible to build a physiognomy sufficiently close to the original with the potential of triggering recognitio