Hans Holbein and the Renaissance Technology of Perspective
The monthly Science on Tap event at National Mechanics.
The anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein’s painting "The Ambassadors" has been a subject of much debate and intrigue since the early Renaissance. Using computer-based image analysis and some historical detective work, Alex Boxer suggests that this famous skull was likely drafted according to a simple geometric scheme that appeared in print a few decades later.
Alex Boxer has been trying his best to live with one foot in the sciences and one foot in the humanities. He has a Ph.D. in physics from MIT where he worked on a nuclear fusion experiment, and a master’s in the history of science from Oxford where he wrote about Newtonian lecture demonstrations. College was at Yale where he majored in both physics and classics.
