莎士比亚唯一真像大曝光

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最近在英国首都伦敦，莎士比亚出生地基金会主席、世界上最权威的莎士比亚研究专家斯坦利韦尔斯展示最近发现的大文豪威廉莎士比亚的肖像画。
这幅肖像画作于1610年，即莎士比亚去世前6年，18世纪早期开始一直由英国科布家族收藏。
画像原先保存在科布家族在汉普郡的一处宅邸，现在被移到萨里郡一处房产中。这座房子现在由英国国家信托基金管理。
Nearly 400 years after his death, William Shakespeare appeared in a new and more handsome guise Monday, thanks to a portrait said by a group of Shakespeare scholars and art historians be the only known portrait to have been painted in his lifetime.

One of the scholars, Stanley Wells, chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, described the portrait at a news conference as a "pinup" of the Bard, showing him as generations of Shakespeare lovers accustomed to stern-faced engravings, busts and portraits have never seen him.

Gone, in the portrait, is the balding, nondescript-looking figure shown in what has hitherto been accepted as the earliest and most authentic representation of English literature's most famous figure, a black-and-white engraving that appeared in the first folio edition of Shakespeare's works in 1623.

In its place, the portrait unveiled in London shows a head-turner of a man in middle-age, with a fresh-faced complexion, a closely trimmed auburn beard, long straight nose and fashionably full, almost bouffant hairstyle.

He is dressed in elaborate white lace ruff and a gold-trimmed blue tunic of a kind worn only by the wealthy and successful men of the age.

At the news conference, Wells and other experts said they were convinced after three years of studying the portrait, and subjecting it to elaborate scientific tests at the University of Cambridge, that it was, in effect, the Holy Grail that Shakespearean scholars have sought for centuries, an authentic portrait of the poet and playwright done in his lifetime. They said the portrait appeared to have been painted in 1610, when Shakespeare was 46.

Previously, scholars have argued the merits of at least four other portraits, one of them the so-called Folger portrait displayed in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. But the experts in London said they were virtually certain from their study of the new portrait that the others were copies, drained of the vibrancy - and good looks - evident in the portrait they unveiled.

The experts said that the newly discovered portrait came to light when Alec Cobbe, an art restorer, visited the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2006 to see an exhibition, "Searching for Shakespeare," at which the Folger portrait was displayed. They said that Cobbe immediately realized that the Folger portrait was a copy of one that had been in his family's art collection for centuries.

The Cobbe portrait is part of a collection that the family inherited through a distant relationship with the 3rd Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, a rakish aristocrat who was Shakespeare's only literary patron. It had hung for more than 250 years in the Cobbe family's home in Ireland, unidentified as a portrait of Shakespeare, when it was inherited in the 1980s by Alec Cobbe, an heir to the family estate.

Cobbe turned for help to his friend Wells, the Shakespeare scholar, and the two arranged to have the portrait tested. The methods included tree-ring dating of the wood panel, and X-ray examination and infrared reflectography of the painting and the panel.