I'm aware of this. But the article gives no reason for this choice. It's rather a "well, couldn't it be" hypothetical, provided as a quote:

> “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.

It's crazy how standards for body size can change over even shorter time periods.

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.

How about 25000 years ago?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine

Of course, this is by no means historic evidence, it's more an example of the common notion of his appearance – and, admittedly, a rather extreme one.

(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.

> Chesterton described Aquinas as looking quite like Chesterton.

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.

It might be added that Dominicans had the explicit calling to crown their preaching by leading virtuous lives marked by poverty. As an example of this, especially in the early days, Dominicans traveled a lot by foot as a form of austerity. This could certainly work with having a bit of a girth, but the full experience of 13th century Dominican life is hard to square with "morbid obesity" or being "physically grotesque". We also know that Aquinas was humble, spiritual and deeply motivated to join this new mendicant order specifically. He resisted all attempts of his noble family to steer him in other directions that would have been more prestigious in the eyes of the world. I also remember reading that Aquinas ate only once a day to devote himself more fully to his work (not sure where though).

> Early accounts depict him as being both very tall and strong having a big head

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.

For example, one of the earliest works covering St. Thomas' life was written by William de Tocco in the early 14th century....The iconographic tradition is also not uniform, with large variation across the centuries.

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.

This reminds me of an ancient Chinese story from the Liezi, where a craftsman presents a robot to King Mu that can sing and dance. After the robot beckons to the kind's concubines, he orders the craftsman to be killed. The craftsman is terrified and deconstructs the robot, demonstrating to the king that it is simply a collection of inanimate items. The king is impressed and says "can it be that the skill of a man can be equal to that of the creator?" It's a great story that I discovered because it's an early instance comparing creativity and invention to divine power. Not sure if it has been translated but the text is here: https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=37480

Thanks for pulling that out! And apologies for my quick post.

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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Magick

[2] https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en

It may be possible to come up with something like an analog version of Markov chains. As you turn a crank words keep sounding out based on probability.

I'd love to see facial reconstruction of people of whom we have pictures and video. Since what I've heard of facial reconstruction is that there is a lot "art" in it.

I can't really sum it up better than the Wikipedia page's author:

> It is easily the most subjective—as well as one of the most controversial—techniques in the field of forensic anthropology.

> From my understanding facial reconstruction from skulls is a well-defined process in forensics

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.

I'd love them to have made more of that if the cranial reconstruction got close to the painting un-hinted.

And probably the hair pattern as well.

> being named ’Register’? It is a relatively common newspaper name

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.

The one cited here most often would not be the national catholic register. I assumed it was thereg from a cursory look before clicking.

Very nice, thank you, I really like it and had not seen it previously!

Italy had and still has a pretty diverse makeup - Germanic peoples from the north, North Africans from the south, and Mediterranean peoples who are the crossroads of the two.

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.

Who knows? He might have been blonde-haired for all we know, after all the Duchy of Spoleto set up by the Lombards was also located in Central Italy. You can get an idea of that past Lombard presence from this map [1]: " Percentage of Blond Hair in the Italian regions" (notice the green blob East of Naples), which, granted, it may not be 100% scientific but I reckon that it is at least based on some real data.

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_...

There are many plausible "skins" for Aquinas. He didn't come from relatively homogeneous place like Japan on Iceland, he was Italian. And medieval Central Italy was a massive genetic melting pot of Etruscans, Latins, Greeks, Celts, Germanic people and North Africans. It used to be crossroads of a massive empire once, and was overrun by several invasions of other peoples afterwards.

Was his family from the Northern or Southern Italian lines?

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...

He was born nearish to Naples in the Kingdom of Sicily, a kingdom created by the Normans. Really hard to guess.

It was an metaphor for the typical cherry picking that religions do.

Edit: no, it wasn't a hyperbole , it was a metaphor

You don’t get all the way to 95 Theses by keeping the boat on an even keel.

Another aspect to consider is that St. Thomas was an O.G. Dominican friar, the order which was founded with a mission to answer the heresy of Albigensians and Catharists, who were going extreme ascetic, believing the human flesh and visible world were inherently evil, and ceasing to marry and bear children.

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

Pre-typewriter, writing was extremely time-consuming and inactive. It was also an occupation afforded to very few. It is not a stretch to assume as a rule anyone engaging in writing was going to be heavier.

Perhaps the most salient reason not to trust his description of the man: he never met Aquinas, nor met anyone who met anyone who met him.

Is it creative? If it's derived algorithmically from a collection of facts, it wouldn't be covered.

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.

But isn't the symmetry just as much made up?

The worship of saints.

TFA:

> He recounted that he reacted with “gratitude and emotion because Aquinas is someone that I’ve not only studied for a long time and taken as a teacher, but also someone I’ve grown to know and love as a saint — and as a spiritual master.”

> “When I saw the reconstruction of his face, it was easier for me to imagine him as a real person who I can have a living relationship with; as a patron saint and as a guide,” he added.

That polytheism is "the truth"? Same mental gymnastics should apply here, though, according to his belief.