A new portrait of Robert Hooke (d.1703)
January 13 2012
Picture: BBC/Rita Greer
There was a nice piece on the Today programme yesterday about a newly commissioned portrait of the great English scientist Robert Hooke. There is no known likeness of Hooke, but, using contemporary descriptions of him the artist Rita Greer has painted a portrait of what he might have looked like (above, unveiled yesterday at the Institute of Physics). Imagine-the-portrait is a fun game to play with great historical figures for whom we have no likeness (like Jesus, for example). But in this case the result is rather terrifying.
