How we can know what historical figures looked like

Cameras has only existed since the 1840ies.  The first photos showed people belonging to the upper classes.  If these become clear enough people at best look normal.  They were not any beauties, no.  When photographing became cheaper we got a more representative selection.  Many individuals looked in a way which would now be considered outright ugly and unattractive.  Since then people has looked better for each generation.  I think this trend can be extrapolated to shortly before the Industrialisation.  How good people looked before that depends on average standard of living.  Which has varied a great deal between different societies.

Portraits has oftentimes depicted people as better-looking than they were.  At least compared to what was then considered beautiful.  Something varying in part over the course of the centuries.  If a trait seems overrepresented during a certain time period it was seen as beautiful then.  Otherwise the general rule applies that what is not ideal is correct.  On the other hand caricatures should not be taken too seriously.  There are a number of caricatures depicting the last French king as obese.  Something we know he was not.

In some cases there is a cast of a famous person’s face.  A such shows the shape of the face, nose, lips and chin.  If the person had scares or protruding dots in the face this is also visible.  Otherwise we can at least know the person had certain traits.  Such as the exact distances between the features of the face, the shape of the chin and nose, eye colour and hair colour and texture.  We can know someone was dark-skinned if the person has been depicted as that.  Most cultures with the art of portrait-making has idealised light skin colour.  (Possibly this applies to all before the camera was invented.)  This is an example of a trait not matching ideals.

Such can disprove ideas about a person’s looks.  One example is Ludwig van Beethoven who is claimed to have been black.  The most dark-skinned Europeans have the same skin tone as the lightest Africans.  Even if we knew his skin tone it would not have been enough evidence.  Now there is a cast of Ludwig’s face.  It shows that his lips and nose were of European type.  Most contemporary portraits show him with wavy hair.  So he was not black in any meaningful sense.  There were other contemporary musicians which were blacks or mulattos.  However, these have largely been forgotten.

Unfortunately his lifetime overlapped with the time of empire style beautification.  This means the exact distances between the features of the face was systematically corrupted.  Don’t they match people alive now I know they are corrupted.  The most famous during the period was Napoleone Buonaparte.  I have seen at least six contemporary portraits were the exact distances between the features of his face matches people alive today.  Four of these match each other.  Three of these four portraits are found here, here and here.  The forth one is one of drawings which this painting is based on.  I am personally convinced he looked like this.  He had black, strait hair and blue-grey eyes.  Besides, his mental unicity should probably not be overestimated.  I wonder what Napoleone’s admirers would say about Simo Häyhä?  They might not know about him because he never led a country.

 

Uploaded on the 17th of September 2025.