Praised for its revolutionary technique and studied for its perplexing imagery, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait has remained a riddle since the 19th century. Completed in 1434 in Bruges, the work showcases a skilled use of oil paints and impressively realistic details. More famous and perhaps more important, however, than van Eyck’s technique are the two figures and the objects which decorate...

Sculpting various 3D facial expressions from a static 3D face model is a process with intensive manual tuning efforts. In this paper, we present an interactive 3D facial expression posing system through 2D portrait manipulation, where a manipulated 2D portrait serves a metaphor for automatically inferring its corresponding 3D facial expression with fine details. Users either rapidly assemble a ...

The paper looks at the digital portrait used in the form of avatars in various online worlds and communication networks. It describes an ongoing modal shift from an ontological understanding of the portrait towards the portrait as performative

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...

Surprisingly, an utterly imaginative "portrait" has become synonymous with Maimonides forever. How and when did this particular portrait become associated with Maimonides? This and many other intriguing questions regarding this portrait are systematically addressed, and its origins, possible inspiration, and hidden objectives are revealed.

Traditional portrait artists use a specific but open human vision methodology to create a painterly portrait of a live or photographed sitter. Portrait artists attempt to simplify, compose and leave out what’s irrelevant, emphasizing what’s important. While seemingly a qualitative pursuit, artists use known but open techniques such as relying on source tone over colour to indirect into a colour...

Britain's National Portrait Gallery, which has recently acquired a striking new wing, has this autumn also obtained a very new kind of portrait. Artist Marc Quinn has created a 'genomic portrait' of Sir John Sulston, former director of the Wellcome Trust's Sanger Centre near Cambridge, who led the UK arm of the human genome project which announced completion of the first draft last year. As the...

Relighting a portrait in a single image is still a challenging problem, particularly when only a single artistic reference photograph or painting is provided. In this paper, we propose an artistic illumination transfer system for portraits based on a database of portrait images (photographs and paintings) associated with hand-drawn illumination templates (276) by artists. Users can select a ref...

Construction of the action potential duration (APD) restitution portrait allows visualization of multiple aspects of the dynamics of periodically paced myocytes at various basic cycle lengths (BCLs). For the first time, we obtained the restitution portrait of isolated rabbit and guinea pig cardiac ventricular myocytes and analyzed the time constant, tau, of APD accommodation and the slopes of d...