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Title: The Many Faces of Santa Claus [Reconstructed Face of St. Nicholas]
Source:
The Inquiring Minds Program
URL Source: http://images.google.com/imgres?img ... 8M:&tbnh=114&tbnw=87&prev=/ima
Published: Dec 25, 2006
Author: The Inquiring Minds Program
Post Date: 2006-12-25 02:12:50 by Morgana le Fay
Keywords: None
Views: 104
Comments: 1
Long before Clement Moore, Thomas Nast, and Haddon Sundblom gave us our modern concept of that “right jolly old elf,” St. Nicholas was the Bishop of Myra, a Christian city in Asia Minor, in the fourth century c.e. A prominent figure in the church during his life, Nicholas became far more prominent—superhuman, in fact—in legend in the centuries that followed his sainthood. Regarded highly in legend for his kind deeds and good acts, if St. Nicholas had a specialty, it was children. He was, in fact, the patron saint of children (among many other classes of people, churches, and geographical locations). Some of his legends have him even more specialized, focusing on rescuing children of the poor who’d been sold or captured into slavery. He accomplished these feats through acts of gift giving and by more “miraculous” means, such as flight. Surely, the face of this man would be rosy-cheeked, smiling, and beatifically kind—something between Moore’s description and the Catholic Church’s favorite portraits of recent popes. But old St. Nick’s face has been carefully reconstructed, using modern forensic techniques, and the face that resulted wasn’t exactly straight out of an animated Christmas special. What are believed to be the bones of St. Nicholas are kept in a sacred crypt in Bari, Italy. They were exhumed in 1953, during some work that was being done on the church, and an anatomist from a local university, Luigi Martino, was given permission to examine and x-ray the remains. A half-century later, an anthropologist named Caroline Wilkinson used those data to produce a clay model of St. Nicholas, employing the same techniques that are used to build an identity onto the skull of the victim of a suspected crime. If the face that Wilkinson produced had been that of an actor looking for work as an extra in Hollywood’s golden era, he would have been plucked right off the street, broken nose and all, and cast as a longshoreman or a mob thug. The features are square and heavy, and he probably had a swarthy cast to his complexion. It’s hard to picture him in the outfit that Clement Moore assigned to him, but then, he was a fourth-century Catholic bishop and probably usually wore something a bit more ceremonial.
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#1. To: Morgana le Fay (#0)
camouflage the great commandments When the going gets weird the weird turn pro. - Hunter S Thompson
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