Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death
ncregister.comIsn't this reconstruction a bit on the slim side? Aquinas was reportedly, let's say, a man of portly presence.
I can't find a scholarly source on the matter, at the moment, but here are two quotes I found on the website of a nun[1] (no less, so probably written in good faith):
> St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet; very mild and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart from the humility of holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his occasional and carefully concealed experiences of trance or ecstasy. (G.K. Chesterton)
> St. Thomas Aquinas was a compulsive over-eater who was not just fat but morbidly obese and physically grotesque. (Myron Shibley)
[1] http://asksistermarymartha.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-fat-was-...
(Fun fact, there's a reference to this in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, alluding to difficulties with the transport of the body over a staircase, which coincides with circumstances of G.K. Chesterton's passing, as described on that page.)
The article discusses this. The researchers admit they can't know for sure if they got that part right. On the other hand, standards for body size were very different 750 years ago than today, so that's certainly part of it. Legends tend to get more exaggerated over time, and the legend of Thomas Aquinas has had plenty of time for exaggeration to build up.
I'm aware of this. But the article gives no reason for this choice. It's rather a "well, couldn't it be" hypothetical, provided as a quote:
> “Now, it could be that on the whole we’re a lot larger now than even overweight medievals were, or that St. Thomas was never the portly friar described by his legend,” Father Aquinas quipped, adding, “Regardless, the stories of St. Thomas’ size are probably exaggerated.”
This is certainly in stark contrast to the centuries-long traditional notion of Aquinas' appearance, which may require some further detail why and how this choice was made. – I can see why the quoted father Aquinas should be excited by this "angelic" appearance, but this may be hardly sufficient to motivate a scientific choice. Personally, I can't see how the size of the skull (the sole evidence) should or could correlate with body mass.
It's crazy how standards for body size can change over even shorter time periods.
I was watching an old game show with Bob Barker and one of the competitions was for people to guess stats about the "average" man, and then run around Hollywood looking for a man who matched that description. So each competitor would guess the average age, height, number of kids, etc. One woman guessed that the average man weighed 180 pounds and Bob Barker mocked her mercilessly for thinking that the average man is such a fatso.
I was about 180lbs by the end of highschool, and I was one of the fattest kids in my class. Not to the point that I was given fat kid nicknames or openly mocked, but I was almost always the fattest kid in any given group. Picked last for teams in gym class, chuckled-at when trying to do pullups for the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.
Now I'm 260lbs and fat by any standard. What I wouldn't give to be 180lbs again.
Idk if you are serious about that, but if you are there is hope. For about $200/month (not going through insurance) it can be quite easy to not eat so much. I have been really shocked by how much my mind has been quieted by not being obsessed about food and never feeling deprived. Downside: you feel full all the time. Hims.com it’s super easy (no office visits no video conferencing) and fast. Not affiliated except as a happy customer (my wife is happy too.) you CAN out-eat it, but it’s far easier not to.
Yes, and people have gotten used to the new standard. I know many people who have lost weight, look great and have a healthy amount of body fat. People then say they are "too skinny", but they aren't by any standard measurement and are still heavier than most from 1980s or before. When like 75% of people are overweight, healthy weight people tend to look thin to people (I get these 'too skinny' comments myself occasionally: 5'10" male, 170lbs, ~13-14% bf).
Similarly, 70s Steve Wozniak was supposed to be kinda chubby, but people this millennium seeing those old photos are like "what? he's totally average?"
He looks semi-hench in the pic on this page with David Lee Roth: https://lamag.com/news/steve-wozniak-us-fest
During the Super Bowl they put up a stat about the size of the average lineman in SB 1 vs now. In SB1 they were 6’3” and about 248lbs (something like that). And now they are 6’6” and 330lbs.
That old OLine gets killed in P5 college football now.
I noticed that as well. Cool stat. And they aren't just big...a lot of them are scary fast. Having a guy like Tylan Grable (6'6, 310) or Tanor Bortolini (6'4, 305) running after you with a sub-5s 40 at the combine has to be terrifying.
When I was in college in the mid-80s, one of my fraternity brothers was a scholarship linebacker. A big, fast, strong man. He goes back every couple of years for the big 'meet the new players' event for those associated with the athletic association. He said that if he was that 18yo again in 2025, not only would he not be considered for a D1 scholarship, but he probably couldn't have made the practice squad of our D1 team. He'd be looking hopefully at someplace like Albany State or West Alabama for a scholarship.
How about 25000 years ago?
This is close to home, geographically speaking (65km). ;-)
Chesterton described Aquinas as looking quite like Chesterton. Judging by the name at least half a millenium separates Myron Shibley from Aquinas.
Can't it just be a myth, as it seems to hang on a single anecdote?
For comparison, the medievals thought that Ovid's name, Publius Ovidius Naso, was because he had a good nose for sniffing out the truth.
Of course, this is by no means historic evidence, it's more an example of the common notion of his appearance – and, admittedly, a rather extreme one.
(And, as already mentioned, Umberto Eco kind of made fun of the semblance.)
Regarding Ovid's name, I think, there was kind of a joy in circular evidence, more for aesthetic reasons than others. Compare, "artifex generale nomen vocatur quod artem faciat" (Isidore), or the notion that the lion indeed obscures its tracks by wiping its path by its wagging tail, because the lion is thus the example of Christianity preserving its secrets from its pagan enemies. There's a medieval joy, even satisfaction, in closures and folds, like this.
> Chesterton described Aquinas as looking quite like Chesterton.
I was unaware that Chesterton met Aquinas! He must have been quite old at that point.
I can't imagine anything that Chesterton could add to this conversation. He's reading the same texts the rest of us are. TBH this pretty much sums up his entire career.
Tastes differ, certainly.
Have you read any of Chesterton’s novels, e.g. The Man Who Was Thursday?
Yes, he's an amazing writer regardless of his target. I primarily think of his christian apologetic work, though, hence why I was teasing his obsession with western (and particularly christian) text.
I love Chesterton. I was just ribbing him. It's not terribly difficult.
The idea that St. Thomas Aquinas was "portly" or even obese is likely an exaggeration that occurred over time due to overemphasis of certain aspects of his appearance. Early accounts depict him as being both very tall and strong having a big head, often with a build closer to a wrestler or football player than that of an obese man. As far as I can tell, St. Thomas was certainly an imposing figure but people have decided to engage in exaggerations based on some accounts of his appearance to the detriment of others.
For example, one of the earliest works covering St. Thomas' life was written by William de Tocco in the early 14th century, St. Thomas is described as "showing himself a robust and virile man" during manual labor. Contrary to the extremely exaggerated accusations of extreme gluttony by people like Shibley, William de Tocco emphasizes that the physical stature of St. Thomas was in accord with moderate and virtuous conduct which would preclude severe gluttony, "[I]t seems that God had fashioned his body as the noblest of instruments, which St. Thomas always held subservient to acts of virtue and which he never permitted to contravene the judgement of reason."
The iconographic tradition is also not uniform, with large variation across the centuries. I'll link some early depictions of St. Thomas Aquinas from the 14th and 15th century that don't match the "morbidly obese" claims:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Lippo_Me...
https://www.kressfoundation.org/kress-collection/artwork/498...
https://catholiceducation.org/en/culture/art/saint-thomas-aq...
https://catholicclassicalict.wordpress.com/wp-content/upload...
https://www.wikiart.org/en/fra-angelico/st-thomas-aquinas-14...
There is another source I recall reading recently that gave credence to the thinner depictions, but unfortunately I haven't been able to dig it up.
It might be added that Dominicans had the explicit calling to crown their preaching by leading virtuous lives marked by poverty. As an example of this, especially in the early days, Dominicans traveled a lot by foot as a form of austerity. This could certainly work with having a bit of a girth, but the full experience of 13th century Dominican life is hard to square with "morbid obesity" or being "physically grotesque". We also know that Aquinas was humble, spiritual and deeply motivated to join this new mendicant order specifically. He resisted all attempts of his noble family to steer him in other directions that would have been more prestigious in the eyes of the world. I also remember reading that Aquinas ate only once a day to devote himself more fully to his work (not sure where though).
> Early accounts depict him as being both very tall and strong having a big head
The article, on the other hand, makes a point that the skull is quite small… (which seems to be the principal argument for the rather slim reconstruction)
At this point, it's probably really more a case of iconography (which, for the most, features Aquinas as one of the most prominent portly men in history) than of actual history. But, I think, any concepts or notions guiding the reconstruction should have been provided, and I'm kind of missing these.
For example, one of the earliest works covering St. Thomas' life was written by William de Tocco in the early 14th century....The iconographic tradition is also not uniform, with large variation across the centuries.
Isn't that kinda the point, tho? de Tocco was writing, what, about 50 years after Aquinas passed, and while he certainly could have (probably had?) first hand sources of Aquinas life, my instinct is that even so these are the sorts of passages of time where objective fact becomes muddled with both nostalgia and agenda, if not outright politics & intrigue. And over extended time, like most notable historical figures, Aquinas is reframed to suit the narrative of the time. I mean, it's not like Livy saying "that thing that happened a couple of centuries ago? This is how it went down, no doubts.", but isn't the real answer "we don't know and probably never will" for most of these questions of minutia like 'how fat was he, really'?
N.B. - not intending to distract from your very informative post.
It’s been awhile since I saw reference to Sister Mary Martha.
SMM is (was — inactive for 10 years now) an online persona and it’s not clear if the blogger was actually a religious sister. The blog’s content seems intended mainly as entertainment.
The first use of the word “android” comes from the discussion of a legendary mechanical talking head invented by Albertus Magnus. Thomas Aquinas couldn’t bear its babble and so he smashed it to bits. So, maybe he’s a patron saint of the anti-AI crowd?
That link just goes to the whole book. For anyone curious: the relevant bit is on page 249, though some pages before and after provide interesting context.
"The same thing is affirmed by [long list] of Albertus Magnus; who, as the most expert, had made an entire man of the same metal[1], and had spent 30 years without any interruption in forming him under several Aspects and Constellations. [...] and being put and fastened together in the form of a Man, had the faculty to reveal to the said Albertus the solutions of all his principal difficulties. To which they add (that nothing be lost of the story of the Statue) that it was battered to pieces by St Thomas, merely because he could not bear its excess of prating. But to give a more rational account of this Androides of Albertus, as also of the miraculous heads, [...]"
[1] i.e., brass ("brazen heads" are mentioned earlier in the paragraph).
(I've modernized the spellings.)
So I think the Androides (I think this is intended as a Greek-looking singular title, not as an English plural; it's a translation of French "Androide") is meant to be a whole person, not just a talking head, although the book talks about it in the context of other things that were just talking heads.
The author declines to believe that Albertus actually made a statue that was able to talk rationally. The specific reasons he gives aren't super-convincing to a modern reader, but I suspect they're mostly rationalizations and his real reason for being unconvinced is just that the story doesn't sound plausible. (Plus, he wants to acquit Albertus of the charge of doing magic in the treating-with-the-powers-of-evil sense.)
He does say that statues able to make vaguely speech-like noises are surely possible "by the help of that part of Natural Magick which depends on the Mathematicks" :-).
This reminds me of an ancient Chinese story from the Liezi, where a craftsman presents a robot to King Mu that can sing and dance. After the robot beckons to the kind's concubines, he orders the craftsman to be killed. The craftsman is terrified and deconstructs the robot, demonstrating to the king that it is simply a collection of inanimate items. The king is impressed and says "can it be that the skill of a man can be equal to that of the creator?" It's a great story that I discovered because it's an early instance comparing creativity and invention to divine power. Not sure if it has been translated but the text is here: https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=37480
Thanks for pulling that out! And apologies for my quick post.
Another book you might like is “Mathematical Magick” by John Wilkins, one of the founders of the Royal Society [1]. In those days, quite a bit of scientific inspiration came from previous works on “natural magick.” There are many books like this at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam! [2]
It may be possible to come up with something like an analog version of Markov chains. As you turn a crank words keep sounding out based on probability.
For an earlyish (but fictional, rather simplistic, and satirically intended) version of this, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine .
Link to the actual page: https://archive.org/details/b30337161/page/249/mode/1up
Hypothesised cranial haematoma after accident with tree, died aged 48. Reconstruction aligns with paintings, but it wasn't clear if the reconstruction model was informed by the paintings so somewhat meaningless they agree.
Also the diagnosis isn't informed by the craniometry from what I can read: it's a reconstruction and an unconnected diagnosis from reports of his death.
Amusingly a website which had (nc)register.com but not theregister.com..
From my understanding facial reconstruction from skulls is a well-defined process in forensics, so it's likely that they used standard methods. They mentioned getting colors (i.e. skin/hair tone) from painting.
I'd love to see facial reconstruction of people of whom we have pictures and video. Since what I've heard of facial reconstruction is that there is a lot "art" in it.
It would also be nice to see police sketch artist renderings compared with the people they depict.
I've noticed that people rarely seem to see much value in testing procedures against questions with known answers.
I can tell you that, having seen some before, injured, and transplanted photos of facial transplant patients, their faces rapidly look much like they used to, regardless of the original person their face was transplanted from.
Bone structure is, as far as I can tell as a layperson, the major determinant of how people look. I found it quite surprising as I thought it would be the other way around.
The only obvious change was hair and skin color, essentially.
> Bone structure is, as far as I can tell as a layperson, the major determinant of how people look. I found it quite surprising as I thought it would be the other way around.
How would it work the other way around? You don't have a "look" before your bone structure exists right?
Right, but naively I would think that your bones are the foundation and your skin and muscles are the house on top. But really, the skin and muscles are more of the paint and trim, and the bones are the foundation, walls, and even part of the roof. Even your nose is largely determined by the angle and width of your facial bones, which is quite surprising to me, given that obviously there's no bone in it past the bridge.
I can't really sum it up better than the Wikipedia page's author:
> It is easily the most subjective—as well as one of the most controversial—techniques in the field of forensic anthropology.
> From my understanding facial reconstruction from skulls is a well-defined process in forensics
It's commonly used, but is it:
* Consistent from practitioner to practitioner?
* Able to consistently pass a double-blind test?
My understanding of forensic 'science' is that it has a bad reputation for having more in common with shamanism, or the rituals of a witchdoctor, than it does with science.
I'd love them to have made more of that if the cranial reconstruction got close to the painting un-hinted.
And probably the hair pattern as well.
What’s amusing about two different sites being named ’Register’? It is a relatively common newspaper name suffix like ‘Times’ or ‘Post.’ Or is there something else I’m missing?
> being named ’Register’? It is a relatively common newspaper name
Incidentally: The Times (The "Times of London", first with that name form), debuted on 1 January 1785, with the name The Daily Universal Register.
Even "interchangable", you may (rhetorically) say.
The one cited here most often would not be the national catholic register. I assumed it was thereg from a cursory look before clicking.
A weekly Summa Theologica reading group, attended by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, led by a professor with credentials in philosophy and theology, was one of the best experiences of my life:
There is also aquinas.cc which has the Summa Theologica as well as a variety of other works by St. Thomas Aquinas, with the Latin text on the left and English on the right.
Very nice, thank you, I really like it and had not seen it previously!
No matter what your beliefs are, if you seriously want to study philosophy, you have to go through it.
Did something similar. It is great.
How accurate are facial reconstructions from skulls now?
They don't seem that accurate in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_facial_reconstruction...
Are there any examples of these types of reconstructions where the reconstruction has been performed blind on the skull of someone for which we have photos?
Yes, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5931631/
Note that the National Library of Medicine is hosted on NIH, and the administration has been scrubbing much of that content, so I think the link works now, but I can't promise that it will stay good.
I would also love to see this. I I'm very skeptic about this kinds of reconstructions based only on the remains.
Let him rest. It doesn’t matter what he looked like. Accept his work as having value or reject it. Slinging his skull around is macabre and obscene.
So, they discarded the form of the face coming from iconography BUT used the colors like hair and skin.
This is SO catholic (well, or religious in general).
> form of the face coming from iconography
You imply that there is only one "form" of his face depicted in iconography, but this is not the case. There is wide variation in how he has been depicted going back to the 14th century. Here is a selection of images from the 14th and 15th centuries which are closer to the reconstruction than they are different:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Lippo_Me...
https://www.kressfoundation.org/kress-collection/artwork/498...
https://catholiceducation.org/en/culture/art/saint-thomas-aq...
https://catholicclassicalict.wordpress.com/wp-content/upload...
https://www.wikiart.org/en/fra-angelico/st-thomas-aquinas-14...
Aquinas was born in central Italy during the High Middle Ages. What hair and skin colour do you think he had?
Italy had and still has a pretty diverse makeup - Germanic peoples from the north, North Africans from the south, and Mediterranean peoples who are the crossroads of the two.
Where I live in the torturous mountains of the north of Portugal, people from villages all of five kilometres apart can look radically different. Our nearest village is your fairly standard Iberian phenotype - dark brown to black hair, and tanned looking. Across the valley is a village that took in Jews fleeing the inquisition - and they look Sephardic to this day. Ten kilometers north is a village still named in local dialect “Moorish village”, and lo and behold, the people there look Arabic.
So what was his phenotype? Only going to find that out by sequencing him. He probably had dark skin and hair, but he could have been blonde and pale.
Who knows? He might have been blonde-haired for all we know, after all the Duchy of Spoleto set up by the Lombards was also located in Central Italy. You can get an idea of that past Lombard presence from this map [1]: " Percentage of Blond Hair in the Italian regions" (notice the green blob East of Naples), which, granted, it may not be 100% scientific but I reckon that it is at least based on some real data.
Later edit: Apparently that map is based on this mid-19th century data sample: Percentages of blond hair in the Italian regions (including Corsica). Data collected by Ridolfo Livi on 1859-1863 lever classes ( "Renato Biasutti - Races and peoples of the Earth - UTET, 1941")
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/62yyuz/percentage_...
My own grandmother was born on the shores of the Aegean Sea, in the region that now forms the border between Greece and Turkey.
She was Slavic herself, and blonde.
The Mediterranean is a lot more complicated that people from afar tend to think.
There are many plausible "skins" for Aquinas. He didn't come from relatively homogeneous place like Japan on Iceland, he was Italian. And medieval Central Italy was a massive genetic melting pot of Etruscans, Latins, Greeks, Celts, Germanic people and North Africans. It used to be crossroads of a massive empire once, and was overrun by several invasions of other peoples afterwards.
Was his family from the Northern or Southern Italian lines?
Did his family include any of the many far off bloodlines bought into Italy via the Roman Empire creating far flung citizens?
As the peer comment states, there's a wealth of pigments in Italy, and that goes back before the High Middle Ages.
The earliest evidence of Italians' extraordinary genetic diversity dates back to the end of the last glacial period
https://www.unibo.it/en/news-and-events/notice-board/the-ear...
He was born nearish to Naples in the Kingdom of Sicily, a kingdom created by the Normans. Really hard to guess.
It was an metaphor for the typical cherry picking that religions do.
Edit: no, it wasn't a hyperbole , it was a metaphor
I think you mean the typical cherry picking that institutions and organizations do, both religious and secular.
Ok, so how would you do it? Pick it random maybe, just ignoring all the sources?
> “Now, it could be that on the whole we’re a lot larger now than even overweight medievals were, or that St. Thomas was never the portly friar described by his legend,” Father Aquinas quipped, adding, “Regardless, the stories of St. Thomas’ size are probably exaggerated.”
According to Martin Luther (who may have had an interest in discrediting him), Thomas Aquinas was able to devour an entire goose, and a piece of his dining table had to be cut out to accommodate his immense body [0]
[0] https://books.google.de/books?newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&hl=de&...
I wonder if Martin Luther would have a reason to slander the head figure of catholicism and creator of the doctrine used by Cajetan to argue against his own doctrine... The same Luther who was proven by his own disciples to have exaggerated many stories about catholics in his biography.
You don’t get all the way to 95 Theses by keeping the boat on an even keel.
Yep, definitely not a slander there. I mean, why would Luther of all people have a problem with one of most important figures of Catholic scholasticism.
Another aspect to consider is that St. Thomas was an O.G. Dominican friar, the order which was founded with a mission to answer the heresy of Albigensians and Catharists, who were going extreme ascetic, believing the human flesh and visible world were inherently evil, and ceasing to marry and bear children.
The Dominicans wearing white and black answer that pleasures can be enjoyed in moderation, and were given by God to help ease our suffering and make life enjoyable, and it's not universally wrong to enjoy rich food, or start families and grow them. Or harness lightning and take minerals from the ground and make them into new things to serve or benefit the human world.
So Aquinas' own confreres wouldn't be shy about describing his stoutness and ability to devour geese twice a year, and it wasn't for nothing that an army came later to massacre the adversaries and quell the heresy from spreading for a few hundred years. There were contagions to deal with and masks to be worn.
Jubilee Years began again in the 14th century after Thomas and before Martin Luther. Jubilees are still decreed and proclaimed every 25 years, plus extras.
Such as 1525: https://gcatholic.org/events/celebration/1524.htm#839
Francis I of France ran into trouble against Spanish Emperor Charles in those days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_I_of_France#Military_a...
1925, 1950, 1975, 2000, etc. See Old Testament for examples among Hebrews and Judaica. Or listen to The Police's greatest hits: https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/The-Police/King-of-Pain
With all respect to Martin Luther, he was also enormously rotund. Gluttony seems to have been the main vice of several important theologians.
Pre-typewriter, writing was extremely time-consuming and inactive. It was also an occupation afforded to very few. It is not a stretch to assume as a rule anyone engaging in writing was going to be heavier.
Also, Luther was born ~250 years after Thomas Aquinas, so this could have already become legend.
Perhaps the most salient reason not to trust his description of the man: he never met Aquinas, nor met anyone who met anyone who met him.
Monasteries and religious houses could be well-supported, wealthy, with comfortable lifestyles for the intellectual, and there were a lot of them.
(In those days there was plenty of support and regulation for two, or more men, to get together and live as a family; women as well)
So now we can study figures such as St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Henry VIII, calling them all to repentance, and consider how their lives ended.
Does anyone know some good Amish furniture for sale online?
Yet, according to a Wikipedia citation, Aquinas is a revered saint in Lutheranism. Which surprised the heck out of me.
I wonder what the licensing related to the image reconstruction is. Like, am I able to use it for the cover of a biography of his I publish?
It’s a creative work, so in most jurisdictions it’d be subject to copyright and unusable without licensing or the creator explicitly using a license like CC0 that allows free onward reproduction and reworking.
Is it creative? If it's derived algorithmically from a collection of facts, it wouldn't be covered.
I think this stuff is art with a little bit of informing from science, so it probably is creative, but I wonder what the authors would claim.
The skin tone and hair style are guessable, but not derived from the science, so definitely qualify as a creative act.
People's faces are very rarely that symmetrical which raises doubt in my mind.
There isn’t enough accuracy in the reconstruction process to be sensitive to subtle asymmetries in someone’s face. It’d be completely making that part up.
But isn't the symmetry just as much made up?