Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445-1488) lived in Italy during the Renaissance. She was a member of the powerful Sforza family from Milan.
[ the marble bust of Ippolita Maria Sforza, by Francesco Laurana ]
Ippolita was the mother of Isabella di Aragona (1470-1524), who is also known as “Isabella of Aragon” or “Isabella of Naples”. You may have never heard of Isabella di Aragona, but perhaps you have seen her portrait numerous times: it is argued that Isabella is the model for Leonardo da Vinci‘s immortal painting, the Mona Lisa.
[ Is she Isabella di Aragona? ]
I am more than happy to leave that speculation to the art historians.
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The bust of Ippolita Maria Sforza
In 1488, artist Francesco Laurana (1430–1502) sculpted a bust of Ippolita Maria Sforza. It is believed that Ippolita died in 1488, so the sculpture was probably crafted in Ippolita‘s last days.
Here’s the twist: it’s also argued that the bust is not of Ippolita Maria Sforza, but of Isabella di Aragona instead!!! It seems that Isabella was quite a mystery woman:
- she may be the Mona Lisa.
- she may also be the model for the bust believed to be of her mother’s.
- she may even have been married to Leonardo da Vinci and given birth to his children.
Who knows?! Let’s take a look at the photo of the bust. Does it look like the model was 43-year-old Ippolita, or 18-year-old Isabella? Draw your own conclusions.
To make things even more confusing and uncertain, there’s also Ippolita Sforza (born in 1481), who was the daughter of a cousin of Isabella di Aragona! Don’t laugh: this younger Ippolita Sforza had a daughter who was also named Ippolita!! This is truly a biographer’s nightmare.
If the bust was indeed crafted in 1488, it’s practically impossible that the model is 7-year old Ippolita Sforza. Therefore, for the sake of clarity, when I say “Ippolita Sforza” I mean Ippolita Maria Sforza.
Some links:
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3-D model of the bust
Art History may be fascinating, but I am more interested in technology. What led me to write this post is that there’s a 3-D model of the bust of Ippolita Maria Sforza. The bust was scanned by the Visual Computing Lab of the ISTI – CNR. The original 3-D model has 500K faces (each face is a polygon, a triangle to be precise) and is available at this model gallery (it can also be found here). You can download the 500K model in two formats:
You can visualize and process these models using MeshLab, for example. There are other software tools, such as VRMesh Studio, but I like MeshLab because it is free, open source, and very user-friendly.
Visualizing the 500K model with MeshLab, we have:
[ 500K model rendered with smoothed mesh polygons ]
This model’s mesh is quite fine. A coarser model would allow us to see the triangle mesh on the model’s surface. MeshLab comes with a sample 50K model (in PLY format) of the bust of Ippolita (a decimation by a factor of 10 of the original 500K model). This 50K model looks like:
[ 50K model rendered with flat mesh polygons ]
Taking a closer look one can see the triangle mesh more clearly:
[ close-up of Ippolita's face (50K model) ]
I really like meshed models. I don’t know why.
I used VRMesh Studio to export both these models in point cloud format (a ASCII text file where each row contains the 3 coordinates of each point in the cloud). This might come handy if I ever feel like processing the point cloud in MATLAB.
[ image courtesy of Satre Stuelke ]
