Making Faces
Body 115 by Michael Crompton
Library Theatre Company, Manchester, 1996
The reconstructed head of Body 115 from the King’s Cross fire was made by Richard Neave at the Unit of Art in Medicine, School of Biological Science at the University of Manchester. Over the last twenty years, Mr Neave has been much in demand from archaeologists and police forces seeking to reconstitute the faces of recovered bodies both ancient and modern. The technique requires the skills of an artist and the probing curiosity of a scientist – although Neave foes not see the two disciplines as fundamentally different: “the artist-draughtsman is the same sort of animal as the scientist,” he says.
The past is about people
The first reconstructed heads began to appear towards the end of the last century as an attempt to get a better idea of what man’s early ancestors looked like. In the fifties much useful progress was made by the Russian Professor Mikhail Gerasimov. Then in 1975 the Manchester mummy project attracted wide media attention. Three Egyptian bodies were unwrapped, but dry bones and desiccated bandages made for rather dull copy in the media. So medical illustrator Richard Neave was called in to revitalise the heads of the deceased. Mummy 1770 revealed itself to be an attractive 13-year-old girl whose visual appeal for the picture-hungry press was enhanced by the speculative addition of glass eyes and a wig.
At the time Neave thought this would be just a one-off, but it so happened that a police officer in the south of England, seeing the re-fleshed head on TV, rang to ask whether the same technique could be used to rebuild the face of an unidentified skeleton. That case led to others, then further archaeological commissions, until gradually over the years this unique branch of forensic medicine has become a valuable and established tool of investigation.
Some bones are more useful than others…
The accuracy of the resulting likeness depends on many factors, not least the state of the skull. In cases where the bones are damaged or incomplete, certain areas are more vital than others: the back of the head, for instance, is less important than the mid-portion of the face, that area between the eyes including the nose and the frontal bone. It is then useful to have at least half of both upper and lower jaws, preferably on the same side so the occlusion of the teeth can be established. Width and height of the head may vary greatly between individuals, so it is the proportions within the features – the distance between the eyes, their angle, the relationship of the nose to the mouth and so on – that can make all the difference in achieving a reasonable likeness.
Complications increase with the age of the body. The amount of ‘facial baggage’ people assume as they get older is unpredictable and the bones themselves do not carry any signs of this. How fleshy was the face in life? Was the natural expression intense and frowning or open and relaxed? Were there deep wrinkles, glasses, an earring? In fact Neave generally aims for a blank, non-committal expression so that if someone knew the person while they were alive, they would recognise the likeness give to take the odd crease, or a few pounds here and there.
The main feature people always ask about, apparently, is the nose – how can the artist be sure he’s got this right? Neave’s answer is that we generally get to know people full-face, so if the profile is not strictly 100% accurate, head-on any slight discrepancy would not greatly affect the recognisability of the reconstruction.
The problems of putting a name to a face
Once a head is completed, a process which usually takes two or three days’ concentrated work, it is publicised to enable concerned relatives or friends to come forward. The successful response, Neave estimates, is nearly 60%. But failure to identify a dead body which has had all this care and attention lavished on it is not always down to the accuracy or otherwise of the reconstruction. Body 115 is assumed to be a vagrant because he has never been claimed. This theory is partly due to the prejudice which dictates that vagrants are not among the sort of people who have regular access to TV or the newspapers, so they would not have had the chance to see any missing companion advertised. Also that population is frequently itinerant, so any friends he had, rather than miss him, would assume he had merely moved on.
Other bodies remain unclaimed for other reasons – an underworld death, for instance, where it is in no one’s interests to claim the body; or maybe the victim was only in this country for a few days, a visitor from overseas whose acquaintances would be unlikely to see his face advertised in the British media.
The head of Body 115 was deliberately left unadorned with false hair so that attention would be focused on the basic structure of the face itself. Heads can, of course, be made to look as realistic as a waxwork, but Neave feels this can be dangerous. “If it looks too convincing you can be making a very powerful statement which may be incorrect, a misleading observation which would work against one.” Besides, to do more than produce a basic clay model takes time and money and the heads are invariably needed in a hurry with limited resources to draw on.
Science, not sculpture
Does Richard Neave ever draw any conclusions about character from the faces he so painstakingly recreates? The answer is no. “Reconstruction is different to making portraits. Artist’s licence can modify things to appear correct” (an artist will often increase the size of the eyes, for instance) “but in reconstruction you’re working within very strict limits. You need to get as close as possible to scientific reality for the work to do its job.”
In twenty years Richard Neave has worked on many dozens of heads, but if he could resurrect the face of anyone from history it would be Alexander the Great. He has already recreated the head of Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, whose contemporary sculptures generally lack the badly disfigured scar obliterating his right eye, the result of an arrow wound.
Not all faces are as distinctive as this, yet each in its own way is unique. It is Richard Neaves’ skill which can recapture something of that quality and help give back to the anonymous dead not only a measure of dignity but perhaps something even more important – a name.
Lindow Man
In August 1984, the body of a man was unearthed from a peat bog at Lindow Moss, Cheshire. It was discovered that he had probably been the victim of an Iron Age ritual killing around 2,000 years ago. Although severely compressed, the body’s skin and internal organs had been remarkably well preserved in the marshy conditions. The decalcified head bones had become spongy and deformed, but after much careful measuring and remodelling, Richard Neave was able to flesh out the skull to its former dimensions.
At the time, the popular press punningly dubbed the man ‘Pete Marsh’, bit subsequent research has gone so far as to suggest an actual name and date of death – could Lindow Man be the druidic prince Lovernios who was ritually sacrificed on May Day AD60 to placate the gods following the disastrous crushing of Boudicca’s revolt by the Roman garrisons? If forensic techniques continue to improve at their current rate, who knows whether one day Lindow Man’s tongue may itself be able to provide the answer…