Search for almost any famous scientist and an image comes back immediately, confidently labelled, reproduced in textbooks and on stamps and in slide decks.
For a surprising number of them the picture is an invention, a guess, or a portrait of somebody else entirely. The errors are not random either. They cluster in ways that say something about when the portrait was made and what the people making it wanted.
The Ones With No Face At All
Start with the clearest category: scientists for whom no likeness was ever made, and every image you have seen was produced centuries later by an artist working from nothing.
Euclid. We do not know what Euclid looked like. We barely know when he lived. Every picture of him, including the one in Raphael’s School of Athens where he is shown bent over a diagram with a compass, is imagination. Raphael is generally thought to have given him the face of the architect Bramante, who was standing about.
Fibonacci. No contemporary portrait. The engravings that circulate are nineteenth century.
Al-Khwarizmi. The image reproduced almost everywhere, a bearded man in a turban, comes from a Soviet postage stamp issued in 1983 for his eleven hundredth anniversary. It is a twentieth century artist’s conception, and it is now the standard illustration in textbooks worldwide.
Hypatia. The mathematician and philosopher murdered in Alexandria in 415 has no ancient likeness. The image used most often is a line drawing made by Jules Maurice Gaspard in 1908 as an illustration for a popular book, and the most famous painting of her is by Charles William Mitchell, from 1885, which shows a nude young woman with long hair against an altar.
The Mitchell painting is worth pausing on, because it is honest about what these inventions are for. It is not an attempt to record a face. It is a Victorian allegory about pagan learning destroyed by a mob, and Hypatia is the vehicle. Every invented portrait is like this to some degree: it tells you what the period that produced it wanted the person to have been.
The One That Is Somebody Else
Robert Hooke has no authenticated portrait, which has not stopped images from being attached to him.
The best documented episode came in 2003, the tercentenary of his death, when a portrait in the Natural History Museum was announced as a likely Hooke. It showed a man of the right period with instruments and specimens around him and it looked entirely plausible.
It was Jan Baptist van Helmont, the Flemish chemist. The identification was withdrawn, but by then it had been published and copied, and images of van Helmont labelled as Hooke are still in circulation twenty years later. Once a caption is attached to a picture on the internet, correcting it is close to impossible.
The One With No Provenance
Thomas Bayes gave his name to a theorem now used in everything from spam filters to cryptanalysis, and the single image of him that exists is genuinely suspicious.
It appeared in 1936, in a book on the history of life insurance, captioned as the Reverend T. Bayes. There is no attribution, no artist, no date, no earlier appearance and no record of where the author got it. The clothing in the picture has been argued about: several historians have pointed out that the clerical dress shown does not match what a Presbyterian minister of Bayes’s kind would have worn, and that the figure looks wrong for the 1740s.
Nobody can prove it is not him. Nobody can produce the smallest reason to think it is. It illustrates every article about Bayesian inference ever written, which is a pleasing outcome for a man whose theorem is about the difference between a belief and the evidence for it.
The One Drawn From Memory
Évariste Galois died in 1832 at twenty, after a duel, having written the foundations of group theory in a few short papers.
There is one authenticated likeness. His younger brother Alfred drew it from memory after his death, and it was published years later. It shows a plain, slightly sullen young man and is the only image with any claim to be him.
The picture usually reproduced instead, a fine looking youth in a good coat, has a complicated history and is probably not Évariste at all, with the most common suggestion being that it is his brother. The romantic image of the doomed genius has been attached, for well over a century, to a face that may belong to the man who outlived him.
The One Where Science Checked
There is a case that ended in an answer, and it is the best story of the set.
Copernicus was buried somewhere in the cathedral at Frombork in 1543 and the precise location was lost. In 2005 a Polish team excavating under the cathedral floor found the skeleton of a man of about seventy, with a damaged skull, in a plausible spot.
Proving identity required DNA, and there was no known relative to compare against. The solution came from Sweden: books from Copernicus’s personal library had been taken to Uppsala during the wars of the seventeenth century, and hairs were found caught in the pages of one of them. Several matched the mitochondrial DNA from the teeth and bone of the skeleton.
A facial reconstruction was then built from the skull. It came out as a man with a broken nose and a scar above the left eye, and it matched the surviving portrait tradition, including a distinctive feature visible in the early images.
So for one sixteenth century astronomer we now have a face confirmed by two independent routes, painting and bone. It is the exception that shows how little of this can normally be checked.
Why the Errors Run in One Direction
A pattern runs through all of this.
- Portraits cost money and were commissioned by, or for, people with standing. A university, a royal society, a wealthy family, a patron. Hooke had no family and no fortune, and there is a gap where his face should be
- The people with no likeness are mostly ancient, non European, poor, female, or died young. Euclid, al-Khwarizmi, Hypatia, Galois, and Bayes the provincial minister. The pattern is not about who mattered scientifically
- The gaps were filled in the nineteenth century, when science was building a public pantheon and needed faces for it. That is when most of the invented portraits were made, which is why so many ancient mathematicians look like Victorian sages
- And the inventions have hardened into fact. A stamp becomes a textbook illustration, which becomes a search result, which becomes the picture everybody knows
What a Collection of Portraits Actually Records
Our book Portraying Science gathers portraits of scientists from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, in oil, tempera, engraving and early photography, arranged chronologically. Working through it, the thing that becomes visible is not only a series of faces but the machinery behind them: who could afford to be painted, which institutions kept their portraits, and what a sitter wanted in the frame beside him, whether that was an instrument, a book or a globe.
Read that way, a portrait is a document about status as much as appearance, which is why the conventions of scientific portraiture changed as science changed. The people missing from the record are part of what the record says.
And if you want a working rule for the next time you need a picture of a scientist: if the person died before photography, lived outside western Europe, or was not attached to an institution that owned oil paintings, treat the image you find with suspicion. Somebody probably drew it a very long time afterwards, and they were drawing an idea.
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