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Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s reply to Stanley Wells and Colleagues , Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cobbe_portrait

The claims for the Cobbe portrait

What people are saying - Counter arguments cannot be regarded as valid

Prof. Stanley Wells has rejected objections that have been raised about the Droeshout engraving “looking too different” from the Cobbe portrait by saying that “painters (like photographers) have ever flattered”. He argues that Droeshout “simplified the portrait for his brass plate”, adding that engravers “usually did simplify and update” (see http://www.shakespearefound.org.uk/evidence.html).

These counter arguments cannot be regarded as valid because they are not in accordance with what was common practice in England and on the Continent at the time of Shakespeare. Portraits in the Renaissance were created ad vivam effigiem, i.e. ”from life”, or ”based on the live model”, and reproduced the physiognomy of the subject - together with all the visible signs of illness - with strict verism in order to create a faithful representation of the sitter’s face and actual physical appearance.[1]

In 1582 the eminent Italian theologian Gabriele Paleotti wrote that it was “necessary to ensure that the face or other parts of the body are not rendered more beautiful or more ugly, or changed in any way ..., even if he [or she] should be very disfigured by congenital or accidental flaws”.[2]

It is this strict verism or realism, which also applies to the work of the engravers of the time, that enabled the BKA (CID/FBI) experts to identify the sitter of the Chandos and Flower portraits and the Davenant bust as well as the man represented by the Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask. Without this absolute truth to life, the medical experts would not have been able to diagnose the signs of disease in these Shakespearean images, all in the same location, but presented at different stages of life.

Droeshout and the sculptor of Shakespeare’s Stratford funerary bust both depicted the poet accurately, although not directly from life but - as was customary in the Renaissance - from a true-to-life portrait or from a death mask. This is why the Droeshout engraving and the funerary bust formed a perfect comparison basis for investigating and finally authenticating the above-named depictions of Shakespeare.

As I have shown in my article in Frankfurter Rundschau (March 14-15, 2009),[3] there are so many divergencies between the facial features of the Cobbe portrait and the morphological and pathological features of the four authenticated, true-to-life images of the bard (and also the Droeshout engraving and the funerary bust) that it can be ruled out that the sitter of the Cobbe portrait represents William Shakespeare.

Prof. Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel
University of Mainz, Germany


Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s reply to Marcia Pointon (summary)

Marcia Pointon’s objections against Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s proofs of authenticity for the Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask as well as the Chandos and Flower portraits have not proved tenable. Pointon raised these objections in a paper she gave in 2006. At that time she could not have been aquainted with the details of Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s findings which were published in German in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (Shakespeare Yearbook) (1996). Pointon’s paper was published in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (1997). Her arguments were then thoroughly tested and refuted by Hammerschmidt-Hummel in her reply in Anglistik. Mitteilungen des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten (Bulletin of the German University Teachers of English (March 1998), pp. 117-130. All this can be followed up on Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s website: www.hammerschmidt-hummel.de. Surprisingly, Pointon’s ten-year-old paper, which was slightly revised, but still contains her long refuted objections, was published again in Tarnya Cooper’s 2006 catalogue Searching for Shakespeare. With essays by Marcia Pointon, James Shapiro and Stanley Wells.

==Reply to Paul Barlow's comments on Prof. Dr. Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel==

Dear Paul Barlow,

Because of the defamatory and insulting character of your entry (to be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cobbe_portrait), which clearly violates the policies and guidelines of Wikipedia, I will contact the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee – unless your entry is removed and the text concerning Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s published comment on the Cobbe portrait gets reinserted and stays there.

Hammerschmidt-Hummel is definitely not - as you call her disparagingly and defamatorily - “an extremely maverick individual with a long track record for obsessively defending distinctly fringe views”. Your careless and incorrect judgment reveals that you cannot have read any of her books - in contrast to the many Shakespeare experts and top journalists who have examined her results closely. They came to the conclusion that she is an outstanding Shakespeare scholar who has discovered new historical and visual sources and has always collaborated with experts from other disciplines which enabled her to resolve existing problems in regard to Shakespeare’s life, times and religion, outer appearance and mistress (the dark lady).

The experts you refer to in connection with the Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask, who think that this mask is “not real”, all rely on an early 20th century art historian who has not even seen the object, as Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel proves in her book The True Face of William Shakespeare (2006). Today’s experts on death masks, the pathologist Professor Hans Helmut Jansen and Professor Michael Hertl, who have widely published on the subject, reject this art historian’s view as “unsound” and not tenable. In his report, the medical expert Prof. Hertl wrote: “The Darmstadt mask is indisputably the original mask.” In addition, Hertl gives a detailed account of Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s findings in his book, titled Totenmasken (Death Masks), published in 2002. Four medical professors examined the visible – progressive - signs of disease on the Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask, on the Davenant bust, in the Chandos portrait and the (original) Flower portrait (not its copy which is presently kept in the RSC depository), which are all in the same location. They expressly confirmed Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s results, i.e. that these images must be authentic and must have been created during Shakespeare’s lifetime or immediately after his death. BKA (= CID or FBI) identification expert Reinhardt Altmann, who employed the latest BKA technology, settled the hitherto open question of identity – by comparing the Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask with the Stratford funerary bust of Shakespeare, the Droeshout engraving and all the other above-named images of the bard.

What you are obviously not aware of is the fact that many Elizabethan pictures are emblematical and full of hidden meanings, as the research results in the field of Renaissance painting are able to show. Hammerschmidt-Hummel has closely cooperated with several specialists in this field and has revealed many encoded allusions in Elizabethan and Jacobean paintings.

The German Shakespeare scholar also carried out the long-term research project “Shakespearean illustrations from 1594 to 2000”, funded by the German Research Council, the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature and the University of Mainz. She collected and compiled more than 7,000 works of artists on Shakespeare’s plays. More than 3000 of them were published by Hammerschmidt-Hummel in her three-volume work Die Shakespeare-Illustration in 2003, containing a comprehensive historical introduction and a lexicon of artists she authored and also a classified bibliography and indexes. In November 2008, the new online archive “Shakespeare-Bildarchiv Oppel-Hammerschmidt” at the University of Mainz, together with an intelligent web interface version, containing the hitherto unpublished collection of 3500 Shakespearean illustrations, was presented to the public.


Below readers of Wikipedia will find numerous quotes from book reviews, articles and comments eminent Shakespeare and literary scholars as well as respected science journalists from all over the world have written on Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s published findings in the form of books, essays, press releases etc.

With regard to her book The True Face of William Shakespeare. The Poet’s Death Mask and Likenesses from Three Periods of His Life (London: Chaucer Press, 2006), in which four authentic and true-to-life images of Shakespeare are presented for the first time, I should like to draw the readers’ attention to the following examples:

*'A brilliant academic study which can also be thoroughly enjoyed by any layperson. … an outstanding achievement’    Dr Paul C Doherty

*‘Her theory makes obvious sense of a long mystery’ A. N. Wilson, Evening Standard

*‘Superimposing the models revealed perfect matches’ Rob Edwards, New Scientist

*HHH  'succeeded in proving that the Davenant Bust depicts William Shakespeare’s authentic lifelike features'  GEO

*'I was not only impressed but also convinced by the author’s arguments, in view of which not a few leading scholars were made to look mere amateurs'    Professor Peter Milward, The Renaissance Bulletin

*HHH's 'elegantly produced volume will surely stand as the definitive work which solves many of the mysteries surrounding the few images of Shakespeare that we possess.     ... the author shows that the so-called Chandos and Flower portraits are ... painted during the playwright's lifetime. This establishes that the 1623 Droeshout engraving ... was copied from the Flower portrait, not vice versa ... [She  demonstrates] that [theDarmstadt death mask's] features exactly reproduce those of the other images of Shakespeare. Professor Michael Patterson, Theatre Research International (Cambridge University)

*‘Over the past decade Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel … has been a scholarly leader in discovering more about Shakespeare’ Douglas Galbi, U.S., FCC, Purple Motes


As to Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s Shakespeare biography, The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, 1564-1616 (London: Chaucer Press, 2007), a few examples may suffice:

*‘Fascinating ... a sheer unbelievably dense network of individual facts, encyclopedic knowledge, scholarly curiosity and intuitive link-ups lead to a genuine advance of knowledge.’H.-Viktor von Sury, Theologisches
(Theological Journal)

*'... the latest in a series of original discoveries the Mainz University professor has made ... [It] reads like a mystery story. ... the author proceeds from one fundamental hypothesis - that Shakespeare maintained the old faith - and moves from one nested hypothesis to the next, to explain biographical events as well as features of the works, which had been hitherto incomprehensible. The hard evidence she presents in the form of historical documentation supports each of the hypotheses most convincingly.’  Muriel Mirak-Weissbach, Symbolism.
An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics

*‘A great book ..., a terrific political thriller ..., an enormously vivid picture of the age, and completely new insights into Shakespeare.’ Professor W. Hortmann,
author of Shakespeare on the German Stage, Cambridge University Press

*'[HHH's] findings in the field of Shakespeare biography reach far beyond what has previously been known. She has achieved a unique success.’ Professor K. Otten, Anglistik (Bulletin of the German University Teachers of English)

*'Hummel's case reveals a remarkable cornucopia of circumstantial evidence. I can not attempt to weigh the pieces for their merits.'   Dr Tom Merriam, Religion and the Arts

*‘... following on the many recent studies of this subject [Shakespeare’s biography] ... there has appeared this outstanding survey of The Life and Times of William Shakespeare by the German scholar, Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, lavishly presented with no fewer than 154 illustrations by the Chaucer Press, after having been translated from the original German which was published in 2003. One’s first impression of the book is that it should make an ideal volume for the coffee-table, it is such a delight to turn the pages and to pause over the illustrations, each provided with a detailed caption and each closely connected with the adjacent text. As for the text, we find a full and critical discussion of all that is known of the life and times of the dramatist with special attention to his Catholic background, his boyhood formation and dramatic inspiration – ....

I have only been able to give a brief outline of all the fascinating wealth of evidence to be found in this volume, to which one may do well to return again and again for fresh enlightenment on the enigma of WS.’ Professor Peter Milward, Renaissance Bulletin


As far as Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s book , Das Geheimnis um Shakespeares ‘Dark Lady’. Dokumentation einer Enthüllung (The Secret Surrounding Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’. Uncovering a Mystery) is concerned, there was a spectacular – unauthorized - publication of her results in the Sunday Times (22 August 1999) – because of an indiscretion of an English colleague. This happened three weeks prior to her publisher’s press conference and caused great damage. There was, however, an extremely positive reaction when Hammerschmidt-Hummel herself presented her findings to the public as well as the new sources he had discovered. In September 2000, a summary of the reaction to this book in the worldwide media appeared in the journal Anglistik.

Since it is impossible to give you examples from the countless reviews and comments on Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s Dark Lady book, an extract of the very first expert opinion may suffice here:

*‘It is a long time since I have read, no devoured a scholarly manuscript with such curiosity, suspense, enthusiasm, approval and undivided admiration as in this present case. It is very skilfully constructed and written in a brilliantly adequate style. The matter-of-factness and precision correspond exactly with the author’s intention of convincing by means of the circumstantial evidence. It is good that she has withstood every temptation to accompany and substantiate her findings and conclusions by stylistic theatrical thunder. The work convinces me in every detail, in all its conclusions. It represents a triumph of cultural-historically guided philology which would also have found the enthusiastic support of Aby M. Warburg or Erwin Panofsky.’
Professor Dieter Wuttke, Renaissance Studies; University of Bamberg, Germany, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., former Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

I would like to close with a remark made by the American theologian Andreas Kramarz. In his review on Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s Shakespeare biography, published in NCR (June 22-28, 2008), Kramarz praises the author’s “meticulous studies of historical documents, pieces of art and Shakespeare’s own works” as well as the “conclusive answers to many of the unresolved problems of the Bard’s life”. He rejects Alan Jacobs who, by ridiculing naïve “code-breaking” attempts in Harry Potter and the Bible, seems to insinuate that Hammerschmidt-Hummel might be among them. Kramarz therefore makes it quite clear:

*“A careful review of her study will certainly come across hypotheses and theories, but the weight of the arguments as a whole, ‘applying interdisciplinary research methods from fields including medicine, physics, botany, criminology, architecture, history of art, archaeology, paleography, jurisprudence, theology, historiography, linguistics, and cultural and literary studies,’ lead to conclusions that can’t be dismissed. Its many small pieces make up a mosaic.”

Kramarz’s simple answer to the final comment of Jacobs (“The Da Vinci Code, the Gospel of Judas, and the new Shakespeare-was-a-closet-Catholic books all demonstrate just how eager readers are to believe in secret meanings. … Give me a break.”) reads:“Break granted. During the break, Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s new Shakespeare biography might make for very profitable reading.”

My recommendation is: Readers of the worldwide community of Wikipedia should engage with Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s books (also with her website www.hammerschmidt-hummel.de) and make up their own minds.
CU!  Serfgzuj

Reply to Paul Barlow by Snemelc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cobbe_portrait