The Virgin Mary may have looked something like this

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This is a reconstruction of what a 1st century 12-14 year old Jewish girl from Galilee may have looked like.
 
It would be as if, based on certain anthropological elements, I made a draft of an American man of English origin of the 19th century and then said: Abraham Lincoln may have looked something like this!

It does not make sense!

Among other things, she looks like she came out of a cave, while the Virgin Mary was beautiful, sweet, nice and intelligent!
 
brown_bear said:
Among other things, she looks like she came out of a cave, while the Virgin Mary was beautiful, sweet, nice and intelligent!
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How does that image “look like she came out of a cave”? She’s quite pretty.

Also, what about that image contradicts “sweet, nice and intelligent”? I don’t want to read a racist tone into your post, but someone might reasonably wonder if you’re associating olive skin and dark hair with not being “sweet, nice and intelligent”.

As a final aside, do we have any evidence that the Virgin Mary was particularly physically beautiful? I’m not saying she wasn’t, but everyone just always seems to assume it and I’ve never fully understood why.
 
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She looks a lot like my niece (during the lockdown when she couldn’t go for eyebrows waxing at the beauty parlor…).

Ps. Both my niece’s parents are from Middle East
 
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I’m so sorry you feel attacked, but I also feel like your post was a little offensive, whether you intended it or not.

I’m from the Middle East where a lot of people have similar features to the picture. Can you see the problem now with saying that she looks like she “came out of a cave”?

I don’t mean this as an attack or an accusation, just to please be careful with your word choice. Granted, maybe the girl’s features are not very pretty to you, but that’s a little subjective. She looks like a young Levantine girl.

God bless.
 
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Dorothy said:
Those bushy eyebrows somehow don’t look right!
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Women in first century Palestine didn’t have all the same cosmetic tools that modern women do. It’s not like she could just go down to the salon and get her eyebrows waxed.
 
brown_bear said:
letting people swear in the threads.
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There you go again. What is this ‘swearing’ you keep accusing us of?

(I am referring to the thread about the Virgin Birth. )

Does swearing mean something different in Italian? What are you intending to say?
 
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brown_bear said:
As for the racist, you really could have spared it.

In three months I have been attacked countless times on the words I have said, but on the ones I have not said it has not happened to me yet.

But let’s go on like this: attacking me for nothing and letting people swear in the threads.
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I’m not attacking you; I’m trying to understand what you meant. What about that image “looks like she came from a cave?” What about it says not “nice, sweet and intelligent”? Clearly something about that face says “not intelligent” and “not nice” to you. What is it?
 
We went through the same thing with the endless “This is what Jesus looked like in real life” threads from that British newspaper who made a model of a typical Jewish man of Jesus’ time (which actually looked a lot like the popular conception of St. Peter).

Poster 1: “Here’s a picture of what Jesus looked like in real life.”
Poster 2: "Well, I don’t think he looked like that at all. I think he looked just like the Shroud of Turin/ the apparition to St. Faustina/ the picture of him in the catacombs etc. Besides, that picture looks ugly. "
Poster 1: “This is a picture of a Jewish man from Jesus’ time. If you think it’s ugly or don’t believe Jesus looked like that, then you’re a racist.”

The bottom line is we have no idea if Mary looked like that picture or not, and some people will find it attractive and other people will disagree and complain that Mary wouldn’t have had those caterpillar eyebrows, etc. It doesn’t mean they’re racists, it doesn’t mean anything, and we have no idea how Mary actually looked and never will. It may be a reasonable assumption that she didn’t look like a blue-eyed white-skinned Anglo-Saxon blonde, but we still have no way of knowing for sure.
 
RolandThompsonGunner said:
What about that image “looks like she came from a cave?” What about it says not “nice, sweet and intelligent”?
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The eyebrows are like Brooke Shields on steroids. Also, her eyes are set in the model so that white shows below the iris. This type of eye position is often associated with psychopaths and murderers, although I’m sure there are some ordinary folks who have it; it’s just pretty prevalent among those who commit violent crimes.

While the face sculpture is pretty, I can see where the eyebrows and eyes would be offputting.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
The bottom line is we have no idea if Mary looked like that picture or not, and some people will find it attractive and other people will disagree and complain that Mary wouldn’t have had those caterpillar eyebrows, etc. It doesn’t mean they’re racists,
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Attractive is subjective (although again, do we know that Mary was particularly physically attractive?) but if someone says “that doesn’t look like her because she was smart and nice” then we can only assume something in that image is at odds with being smart and nice. It’s not crazy to wonder if there’s a racial undertone.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
The eyebrows are like Brooke Shields on steroids. Also, her eyes are set in the model so that white shows below the iris. This type of eye position is often associated with psychopaths and murderers, although I’m sure there are some ordinary folks who have it; it’s just pretty prevalent among those who commit violent crimes.
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Fair. The eyes do look a little off. It just looks like someone with kind of a weird expression on their face, though. I’m sure there are pictures of me where the camera caught me at a bad moment and I look like a dead eyed war criminal.
 
It would be possible to take a large number of skulls from that place and period, do facial reconstructions and digitally average them and produce a likely range of appearance. Even then the likelihood of producing an image that someone would ‘recognise’ as the original would be very unlikely because the human brain identifies very small variations in facial appearance.

Is there a stronger interest in the ‘true’ appearance of saints among Catholics? Perhaps because of the practice of veneration of images?
 
aroosi said:
At some point touching eyebrows were considered to be very desirable.
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They’re actually pretty trendy right now.

I myself have pretty light eyebrows, and the beetle brows a la Frida Kahlo have never been to my taste.

As attractiveness is subjective, I’m sure there are people who love it.
 
FiveLinden said:
Is there a stronger interest in the ‘true’ appearance of saints among Catholics? Perhaps because of the practice of veneration of images?
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Frankly, other than an occasional passing interest, I’ve never heard of Catholics caring that much what Mary or Jesus actually looked like when they walked the earth, with the possible exception of those who believe that the Shroud of Turin is the actual face of Jesus. (Some Catholics do not believe this and it is not a required belief.)

Most Catholics would probably figure they had tan skin and dark hair and picture them as being physically attractive in whatever way the individual Catholic thinks is physically attractive. There are some traditions that Jesus had reddish/ auburn hair based on Scripture references. That’s about as far as people take the idea.

At this point we have traditions in European Catholic art regarding how not only Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, but also pretty much every one of the Apostles, looked, so we typically picture them as looking that way. It doesn’t mean that’s how they actually looked, but it gives some commonality to our shared thought, at least with other people of European descent. If one is an Asian Catholic or African Catholic, one likely has some different shared images.
 
In my country, I am considered one who expresses himself with great property and calmness.

Communication between Italians is different: we are rougher, more rude, but we are less hypersensitive than you.

I’ll give you an example: the girl in the photo, you say she is Middle Eastern, and it will be true, but she could very well be from southern Italy. Yet no one in southern Italy would have ever made an objection like the ones you are making to me. Because we are used to a more informal language, to shoot it a little big, not to measure the words too much.

In Italy they would have said: “Okay, he doesn’t like that little girl as a representation of the Madonna, what’s the problem?”

Here you are killing me with words, you have nailed me dozens of times for a wrong word. ,

I have asked myself hundreds of times: «Are they angry with me? They don’t like me and they don’t tell me because here things are never said too directly? "

If you dislike me, have one of your meetings, give me a whistle and I’ll disappear.

But first I greet Salibi and the other Middle Eastern friends whom I did not intend to offend in the least: apart from my skin a little too light, for everything else I could be one of the many in the crowd in Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and I don’t know where else. , so it’s against my interest to offend you 🙂
 
RolandThompsonGunner said:
As a final aside, do we have any evidence that the Virgin Mary was particularly physically beautiful?
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Michelangelo believed that both Mary and Jesus had to be esthetically beautiful because they were without sin.

But in real life we don’t know. I imagine Jesus was quite strong because he was a carpenter. And he had to be taller than Zaccheus.
 
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