Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death
ncregister.com
ncregister.com
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.)
> “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.
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.
That old OLine gets killed in P5 college football now.
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.
Now I'm 260lbs and fat by any standard. What I wouldn't give to be 180lbs again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have you read any of Chesterton’s novels, e.g. The Man Who Was Thursday?
I love Chesterton. I was just ribbing him. It's not terribly difficult.
(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.
"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" :-).
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]
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..
I've noticed that people rarely seem to see much value in testing procedures against questions with known answers.
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.
How would it work the other way around? You don't have a "look" before your bone structure exists right?
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.
> It is easily the most subjective—as well as one of the most controversial—techniques in the field of forensic anthropology.
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.
Did something similar. It is great.
They don't seem that accurate in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_facial_reconstruction...
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.
This is SO catholic (well, or religious in general).
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.
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...
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_...
She was Slavic herself, and blonde.
The Mediterranean is a lot more complicated that people from afar tend to think.
Edit: no, it wasn't a hyperbole , it was a metaphor
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...
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&...
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
(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?
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.