Poetic self-portrait

Self Portrait of Youth

The mind's self-portrait.

Scientific psychology and neuroscience are taking increasingly precise and comprehensive pictures of the human mind, both in its physical architecture and its functional processes. Meanwhile, each human mind has an abbreviated view of itself, a self-portrait that captures how it thinks it operates, and that therefore has been remarkably influential. The mind's self-portrait has as a central fea...

A self-portrait of young Leonardo

One of the most famous drawings by Leonardo da Vinci is a self-portrait in red chalk, where he looks quite old. In fact, there is a sketch in one of his notebooks, partially covered by written notes, that can be a self-portrait of the artist when he was young. The use of image processing, to remove the handwritten text and improve the image, allows a comparison of the two portraits. A special e...

Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). Self-Portrait, 1919.

Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy, where he grew up in a Jewish ghetto. He studied art in Florence, and in 1906 he moved to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and other leading artists of his era. In Paris, he was influenced by fauvism, the avant-garde art movement promoting a strong, emotional, and nonrealistic use of color, and by his friend the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, known...

Portrait

Born in 1944, I grew up in a world in which polio was both a gripping fear and real threat. Then in a matter of a few years-polio was eradicated by a vaccine developed by Jonas Salk. Later I learned that Salk's efforts were built on pioneering work of many others, including John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins (Nobelists, 1954), and David Bodian, who pioneered studies of polio patho...