Art imitating life
Maja d’Hollosy brings our ancestors to life, but her work is as much art as science, finds Annemarie Hoeve
PHOTOGRAPHY: FULCO SMIT ROETERS
A white skull grins silently from the tabletop.
“This guy is from the Stone Age, about 5,500 years ago,” says Maja d’Hollosy. He doesn’t have a name, but is known as the Ypenburg man, because that’s where he was found. The skull is a 3D print-out of the original. So what’s it doing on the table? Maja is a physical anthropologist with a rare speciality; give her a skull and she can tell you whether it’s male or female and the person’s age at death, and can reconstruct a face from the bare bones.
She flips through an album of photos showing Mr Ypenburg’s steady progress from skeleton to Pinhead (the spiky star of horror flick Hellraiser) lookalike, to a rather gentle-looking fellow.
With a good shave and a spot of moisturiser, he could pass for your next- door neighbour. “It’s funny”, Maja says, “but some people think that back then, we looked like apes, when we really haven’t changed much at all,” she says, adding that she sometimes spots a person in a magazine with a similar face to her latest project.
The number of pictures in the album reveals how laborious the process can be. It takes up to two months to finish a single face. She starts off by placing pins at strategic places, to mark the tissue thickness required at each point. There are official tables charting averages based on ethnicity and age.
She taps her forehead. “Here, your skin is only a few millimetres thick, while your cheeks are over one centimetre,” she says, squeezing some flesh between thumb and forefinger. Next, she constructs the main facial muscles in clay. On top of that comes the skin. Finally, she makes a mould of the clay head to create a silicon replica, which she colours and paints. A wig of human hair provides the finishing touch.
That’s the stage that Hildegard is in. Still bald and without eyelashes or eyebrows, Hildegard patiently awaits her tresses on Maja’s work bench. The skin looks incredibly lifelike, even up close, with a thousand subtle hues and even miniscule red lines suggesting too much sun exposure. Hildegard last saw the light of day 1,600 years ago, when she was between 24 and 30 years old, and is something of a mystery. She was found on her stomach and alone, with no other graves nearby. Both facts are unusual.
To add to the enigma, she was wearing a valuable necklace of glass and gold leaf. Her lower arm showed signs of a partially healed fracture that often occurs when people fight off attackers.
Isotopic research on her teeth reveals that, in all likelihood, she grew up in England. “They think she may have been a human sacrifice, but people are quick to think that when they come across things they can’t explain,” Maja says.
With the thinnest of brushes, Maja tenderly applies some paint to the corner of one of Hildegard’s glassy blue eyes. It’s an odd sensation, to be face to face with someone who lived and breathed the same air so long ago. Although rather spooky, the unblinking deadpan glare looking back at her doesn’t phase Maja.
Like a modern-day cabinet of curiosities, her whole studio is littered with skulls and casts, ranging from the realistic to the quirky. A Mexican necklace of small, smiling skulls dangles from a shelf bearing what looks like an anatomically accurate action figure.
Not all of her colleagues are equally unaffected. “When I finished Trijntje – the oldest skeleton found in The Netherlands, dating from 7,500 years ago – archaeologists in the depot had to put a bag over her head, because they found her so frighteningly lifelike,” she says, a little proudly.
That’s quite a compliment in this line of work. But to what extent did the ancient Mr Ypenburg, Hildegard or Trijntje actually look like their reconstructed counterparts? “The general form of the face is based on research and the physical remains, but eye colour, wrinkles and hair colour are educated guesses,” Maja explains. Many diff erent fields come together in this job: science, art, working with your hands. That’s what she likes about it, plus the fact that it’s always different. “No two skulls are the same,” she says.
One of her most unique projects so far entailed recreating the faces of a Medieval couple from the 13th century. From the markings on the tomb, archaeologists knew that they had discovered the bodies of prominent knight Willem van Brederode and his wife, Hillegonda.
Because of their social status, much more was documented of their lives than of Maja’s often-anonymous other clients, including where they lived. The couple’s estate can still be visited today. In fact, after their make-over, they quickly high- tailed it to their former home, Brederode Castle, for a temporary display – Lord and Lady once again presiding proudly over their domain.
No doubt they were shocked at the state of it, now lying largely in ruin, while they themselves had weathered the intermittent centuries so well, with a little help from Maja.
Anthropological reconstructions is a pretty niche trade, and largely funded by museum commissions. You could ask yourself, ‘what the point is of such reconstructions?’ It won’t change the fate of these long-dead individuals. Wouldn’t it be better to leave them in peace?
“I probably shouldn’t say this as a physical anthropologist, but maybe it’s better if their remains were eventually reburied,” she says. “After all, they were originally buried with the idea that they would remain so.” She points out, however, that many of these finds are made on building sites, so their final resting place would be disrupted anyway.
“In that case, it’s better that they are excavated and studied than that they are destroyed by a bulldozer,” she says. And so, in a mix of modern science and old-fashioned craft smanship, history is brought back to life. These 3D illustrations of our ancestors provide access to individual lives that would otherwise remain forgotten and can teach us something about our origins.
As for Maja, her hope for the future is to delve into an even more distant past – she’s itching to get her hands on a Neanderthal. “So far, only a brow bone has ever been found in The Netherlands,” she says. That’s not a lot to go on, even for this master sculptress.
