The Maimonides portrait is selleck screening library undoubtedly one of the world’s most famous and easily recognizable universal icons. Portraits, including those of Jewish prominent leaders and scholars, became fashionable long after Maimonides died. We have no way of knowing what Maimonides really looked like, yet a single utterly imaginative “portrait” has successfully Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical defined our conception of Maimonides for ever. Of the numerous available versions of this portrait let us focus on the pen-and-ink drawing frequently cited and known as “portrait and autograph” (Figure 1).1 The depicted Maimonides signature in this picture is unequivocally authentic and resembles his numerous verified signatures

found in the Cairo Genizah (Figure 2).2 However, many intriguing questions come to mind when appraising the portrait itself. In the following article we’ll try to answer these questions. Figure 1 Maimonides’ traditional portrait and autograph.1 This nineteenth-century imaginative depiction,

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical courtesy of the Granger Collection, NY, is possibly by the American illustrator Arthur Burdett Frost. Figure 2 The enlarged signature in the picture (above) compared to Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the almost identical authentic one found in the Cairo Genizah (below).2 HOW AND WHEN DID THIS PARTICULAR PORTRAIT BECOME ASSOCIATED WITH MAIMONIDES? The earliest Maimonides portrait, dating back to the fifteenth century, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical is attributed to Professor Moshe-David (Umberto) Cassuto (1883–1951) who reportedly 3 discovered it in 1935. Professor Umberto Cassuto, a member of the Academic Council of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has discovered a new portrait of Maimonides made in the 15th century. The portrait is coloured and is of rare artistic value, showing Maimonides in oriental dress. Regretfully, the exact details of that particular intriguing discovery are unknown. Professor Cassuto, a renowned Rabbi and scholar, has written the Maimonides article in the Treccani Encyclopedia and was intimately familiar with the rare handwritten and beautifully illuminated copies Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical very of the Mishneh

Torah created in Italy and Spain in the fifteenth century. It is plausible that, while cataloguing all Hebrew manuscripts in the Vatican Library (later to be published as Codices Vaticani Hebraici), Professor Cassuto has indeed encountered and identified such a portrait. Luckily much more is known about a portrait that dates back to the eighteenth century. This image was probably first “discovered” in the mid-nineteenth century by Yashar (R. Isacco Samuele Reggio, 1784–1855), an Austro-Italian scholar, mathematician, voluminous writer, and rabbi born at Gorizia. Reggio was one of the prominent leaders of Jewish emancipation and found the portrait in a 34-volume encyclopedic work called Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum (1744–1769).