The last Plantagenet king of England facing Angers

Thanks to the reconstruction of his face, the last Plantagenet king of England, Richard III, whose ancestors were originating from Anjou, looks to revive. Killed in 1485 at the battle of Bosworth by his foe, and successor, the Tudor Henry VII, Richard III was buried hastly in a little church of a monastery demolished and hidden for years under the black asphalt of a Leicester car park. His skull, uncovered in August 2012 with his skeleton, has been studied by a professor of cranio-facial identification at Dundee University with the same scientific procedures that would normally be used to put faces to unidentified victims of crime.

 Using images from a scan of the skeleton, the specialist was able to look at a 360-degree image of the skull and begin the process of reconstruction. In the programme, one of the first observations was that the skull was “gracile” and not strongly masculine. The reconstruction process began with the attaching of virtual pegs to the surface of the skull so it gives a contour and each peg represents the distance from the surface of the skull to the surface of the face. 

The next step began by adding the anatomical structure, starting with the eyeballs and slowly building up the muscle structure, fat tissue and skin (The whole process is carried out in a 3D computer system using pre-modelled, pre-scanned data to speed up the process). Then the virtual skin is placed on top of the muscle structure in a similar way to real clay, building it up roughly at first until it becomes smoother and more detailed. the nose was choosen from the database that is similar to the one they want and then they alter that to fit the skull.

Angers last year memorialized the execution of Edward Plantagenet, the legitimate pretender to the throne of England after the death of Richard III. Edward Plantagenet was executed by order of Henry VII. Curiously, the simultaneous discovery of the remains of Richard III were never related by Angers press while the city of the Plantagenet partially dedicated the Accroche-Coeurs 2012 to that dynasty.