Mozart not 'chocolate box handsome'
The Local - [email protected] •
24 Nov, 2014
Updated Mon 24 Nov 2014 13:52 CEST
The dapper and handsome image of Mozart on Austria’s popular Mozartkugeln chocolates may be very far from the true appearance of the musical genius, according to a new biography from Munich-based writer Eva Gesine Baur.
Illustrator Daniela Gattinger used eyewitness accounts and a few authentic portraits from the time to reconstruct an image of Mozart as he would have looked in 1791, the year he died aged 37.
Her portrait, used in Baur's book, shows a man with pockmarked skin (from childhood smallpox), unkempt ash blond hair, a pudgy nose and a squint in one eye. He was, Baur says, not very tall - probably just around 156 centimeters.
In real life Mozart was “anything but attractive”, Baur writes in her book Mozart - Genius and Eros.
Mozart was born in Salzburg and died in Vienna, from what Dutch researchers believe was a bacterial throat infection.
Daniela Gattinger's image of Mozart.
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Illustrator Daniela Gattinger used eyewitness accounts and a few authentic portraits from the time to reconstruct an image of Mozart as he would have looked in 1791, the year he died aged 37.
Her portrait, used in Baur's book, shows a man with pockmarked skin (from childhood smallpox), unkempt ash blond hair, a pudgy nose and a squint in one eye. He was, Baur says, not very tall - probably just around 156 centimeters.
In real life Mozart was “anything but attractive”, Baur writes in her book Mozart - Genius and Eros.
Mozart was born in Salzburg and died in Vienna, from what Dutch researchers believe was a bacterial throat infection.
Daniela Gattinger's image of Mozart.
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