A day after it was confirmed that the bones discovered underneath a parking lot in Leicester, Britain, last summer were indeed those of King Richard III, a computerized reconstruction of the skull and a plastic model were released Tuesday that apparently showed how the monarch looked like.
Calling him "His Grace Richard Plantagenet, King of England and France, Lord of Ireland", people who have striven to restore the king's reputation unveiled a 3D reconstruction of the king's face. The constructed face of the king has delicate and mild features that, according to the devotees of Richard, defy all the negative qualities Shakespeare has immortalized him with in his play.
They said that the reconstructed face of the king is gentle and more humane and not like a man cast by William Shakespeare as a Machiavellian hunchbacked tyrant who killed his nephews to remain in power.
Philippa Langley of the Richard III Society who led the search for the king's remains said to reporters, "I hope you can see in this face what I see in this face and that's a man who is three-dimensional in every sense."
"It doesn't look like the face of a tyrant. If...you look into his eyes, it really is like he can start speaking to you," she said.
The reconstruction was created by Caroline Wilkinson, professor of craniofacial identification at the University of Dundee. Based on assessments of the skull, the reconstruction is said to depict the king's face with fair accuracy.
Although some of the features of the king such as wig, clothing and the colors of the eye and skin were adapted using the king's portraits, the main facial reconstruction was independently created assessing the anatomy of the skull.
Langley said that the face did not have the slant eyes, mean mouth and had "no clawed fingers beneath it" that were depicted by the portraits that appeared during the reign of Henry VII who conquered Richard III at a Battle in Bosworth Field in 1485, Reuters reported. It had no resemblance to the caricatures that appeared in Tudor dynasty that followed, she said.
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