Rembrandt Rhinoplasty

October 27, 2006 at 9:09 am | In Lifestyle, Pop Culture |

Plastic surgery has been increasingly gaining ground in the hearts of both men and women. After all, we do live in a world dominated by pictures of good-looking people, whose perfect looks often enough leads us to the office of a plastic surgeon in a quest for long lasting youth.

A lot of progress in plastic surgery has come as a result of intensive lab research leading to improved techniques and impressive results. But for Dr. Tali Friedman, a plastic surgery resident at Assaf Harofeh Hospital, research drove her away from the lab into art libraries and museums, where she conducted two studies aiming at showing that art and plastic surgery are not two parallel universes, as is widely admitted, but fields that interact.

In her first study, she (with Dr. Yaakov Golan) examined the aging process in a series of photographs by Nicholas Nixon who annually photographed his wife and three younger sisters over a period of 25 years. She discovered interesting details that shed light on the pace of aging as well as the process itself.

For example, she discovered that the process of drooping eyebrows began at a relatively early age, in the middle of the third decade. But what really surprised me is what Dr. Friedman said regarding photo data depicting a person’s aging process: “In professional literature, although there is a great deal of work that describes facial aging, there is no series of pictures that documents changes in the face over time like the pictures of the Brown Sisters” (Nixon’s series of photographs).

Her second and more elaborate project focused on the examination of 25 of Rembrandt’s self-portraits reaching the conclusion that the “asymmetry of his face was so distinct that he also noticed it and consistently depicted it”. But her research went further than that.

She employed her medical knowledge of the aging process in giving a new perspective over which portraits were Rembrandt originals and which not, a topic of controversy among art researchers up until today. Her research concluded that 9 out of the 15 painting under examination were authentic Rembrandts and one for sure not.

So, it turns out that both medicine and art share more grounds than we think, which leads us once more to the question, “Does life imitate art or does art imitate life?”.