After presenting to the world the reconstruction of Mary's real face - mother of Jesus -, the Virgin of Guadalupe’s and the Mona Lisa’s, researcher and designer Átila Soares da Costa Filho (post-graduated in Archeology and Anthropology) submerses again to the artificial intelligence and concepts of Anthropology to reveal how one of the most famous characters in the North American History would have looked like: Matoaka (1596-1617), the Pamunkey Indian best known by her native nickname, "Pocahontas". She was world widely popularized thanks to Disney's 1995 animation. Later, in 1998, these studios would also make a sequel, Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World, and a live-action version is currently in the plans. This time, the basis of the experiments was the portrait made in 1616 by Dutch engraver Simon de Passe, considered to be the closest surviving source for the real Pocahontas.
Pocahontas' (left) presumed appearance versus "pop" imagination: historical facts, once again, on a collision course against the entertainment industry
(PICTURES: Átila Soares / The Walt Disney Company Studios).
(PICTURES: Átila Soares / The Walt Disney Company Studios).
According to Átila, in addition to some A.I. tools and image editing softwares, many historical and anthropological issues were considered - with special attention to the Pamunkey people - in order to achieve a result more faithful to what the experiment proposed. One of them was to try to partially discard De Passe's personal style in the search for the character's original face: "Every illustrator/artist, more or less consciously, leaves his personal mark in the way he portrays a subject - it's his style. This is a positive thing in terms of the artist's expression of innovation, but on the other hand, his technique could bring some dissonance to the so-called objective reality of the true physiognomy for the portrayed subject. In an even more technical sense, the standardization of the features throughout the work of De Passe - himself not considered a great portraitist ever - is notorious, where the facial homogeneity of his models stands out. This becomes clearly evident when we compare the portraits of Katherine Manners, Magdalena De Passe (his sister), Count Filips de Hohenlohe, and Francisca Carr among themselves: all of them strongly resembling that one of Pocahontas. Add the fact that the engraving is actually just a Dutchman's version of the only lost portrait of the powhatan "princess". And, finally, the attempts to Europeanize as much as possible the image of the native, baptized in Christianity as Rebecca Rolfe, should not be ignored.
Portraits by De Passe, Pocahontas and Francisca Carr: standardized faces to bring low historical reliability up
(IMAGES: National Portrait Gallery / Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.).
(IMAGES: National Portrait Gallery / Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.).
This reconstruction rescued a possible appearance of Pocahontas at the age of 9 (age considered so by Meera Baswan, co-founder of the Indigenous Foundation, Shannon Quinn from the History Collection, and E.L.Hamilton from the New York Post), when the events that brought her close to Captain and settler John Smith in Jamestown, Virginia (USA) took place. Although immortalized in Literature and the Arts, the much romanticized fiction and the myth that has been built around it clash violently with reality. Far from a typical Disney tale, eleven years later the most notorious of the indigenous women, the daughter of chief and powhatan representative, Pocahontas, the "meddling child," would die, responsible for some peaceful agreements between settlers and natives. The cause, it's speculated, may have been pneumonia or tuberculosis.
Opening picture: still from Pocahontas (The Walt Disney Company Studios, 1995).