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Before the development of photography in the early nineteenth century, artists created life masks to capture an accurate likeness of a person. Life and death masks also helped memorialize individuals. Phrenology, the pseudoscience of reading character through facial features and the shape of the head, also fueled interest in life and death masks in the nineteenth century.
In 2014, President Barack Obama became the first sitting president to have his likeness captured with 3-D imaging and printing technologies. The Smithsonian's Digitization Program Office created this high-resolution 1:1 scale 3-D image by combining a series of digital photographs with data from patterned light scanners. The resulting image captures, with great accuracy, the actual features of the subject, as opposed to a portrait artist's interpretation of those features.
This is one of a number of the Portrait Gallery's likenesses of President Obama. The president's official portrait for the museum's "America's Presidents" installation will be commissioned at a later time.
The Smithsonian's Digitization Office also created 3-D scans of the Portrait Gallery's two plaster life masks of Abraham Lincoln. You may see the original masks upstairs in "America's Presidents." |