How do we know what the first popes looked like?

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Issa87

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I saw a diagram of all of the popes from St. Peter to Pope Francis in my parish office. I was wondering how we know what the early popes look like? Do we really know what they look like or are those pictures what we think they looked like? Or how can you explain how we have a picture of every pope the Church has ever had?
 
Issa87 said:
I saw a diagram of all of the popes from St. Peter to Pope Francis in my parish office. I was wondering how we know what the early popes look like? Do we really know what they look like or are those pictures what we think they looked like? Or how can you explain how we have a picture of every pope the Church has ever had?
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Artistic license. Same as we have for all the pictures of the saints, prophets, patriarchs, even Our Lord Himself.Michelangelo painted God the Father and Adam. In many cases you can only identify the subject of the picture by either the context of the picture or some symbols that are identified with a particular person.

Also a lot of the artwork is time-, race-, and culture-specific. I’ve seen numerous medieval pictures of the Twelve Apostles – all white guys with robes and tonsures. :rolleyes:

I guess when they made the big chart they didn’t want to do the same thing as the high-school yearbooks do, a grey silhouette with “NO PIC AVAILABLE” on it.
 
I am sure that some of those are “artist’s conceptions.”
 
Well, that brings me to another question then. When did they start painting the popes from real life if we are just guessing what they looked like in the beginning of the Church’s history?
 
The Catholic church counts 265 popes starting with the apostle Peter. Although many painted images of St. Peter exist, it’s highly unlikely any of them could be considered portraits. The same could be said for most, if not all, of the popes for the first two or three centuries, though one, a fresco of the second century pope Anicetus (left, 155-166), said to be painted by Antonio Circignani (AKA Pomaramio) is so well done and distinctly natural it might well be considered the first authentic papal portrait. It’s also the first papal portrait to be attributed to a known artist.
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From Art Now And Then: Pope Portraits
 
Wow. So since Pope Anicetus was thought to be painted accurately and from life, then it is possible that the paintings of the ealier popes and Jesus and the apostles could be accurate? Do we have pictures of Jesus and his apostles from the first or second century?
 
Issa87 said:
Wow. So since Pope Anicetus was thought to be painted accurately and from life, then it is possible that the paintings of the ealier popes and Jesus and the apostles could be accurate? Do we have pictures of Jesus and his apostles from the first or second century?
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Possible but unlikely. They were just lucky getting what appears to be a contemporary portrait of Ancietus.
 
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