". . . within stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white mustache, and clad in black from head to foot; without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. . . his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed as cold as ice-- more like the hand of a dead than a living man... His face was a strong-- a very strong aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round his temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy mustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin.  The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor."

The images above have been organized chronologically:

• Max Schreck as the horrifying, rat-like Graf Orlok (a thinly disguised Count Dracula with a charm all his own) in F.W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu
• Bela Lugosi: the man responsible for immortalizing the Hungarian-inflected, evening-dress wearing Dracula from Tod Browning's 1931 film
• Carlos Villabas mimicked Lugosi in the superior Spanish-language version filmed simultaneously with the Browning classic
• John Carradine picked up the Dracula role for Universal's House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945)
• Carradine also played the Count on stage throughout the 1950s with the heavy white moustache mentioned by Stoker
• Christopher Lee revitalized the Count in a string of Technicolor Hammer productions beginning with Horror of Dracula in 1958
• In 1970 Lee appeared in Jess Franco's El Conde Draculaa portrayal often touted as being very true to Stoker's conception of the Count (clad entirely in black, with white moustache and white hair, etc.)
• Also in the early 1970s Lee appeared briefly as Vlad Tepes in the television documentary In Search of Dracula
• Udo Kier played a sympathetic and anemic Count in the 1973 film known as  Andy Warhol's Dracula
• Frank Langella was magnetic, though something of a Transylvanian Travolta, in Universal's 1979 remake of the Balderston/Deane adaptation first filmed in 1931
• Also in 1979 Werner Herzog remade Nosferatu in color with Klaus Kinski in the title role
• 1992 saw the release of Bram Stoker's Dracula (which was anything but Stoker's Dracula) directed by Francis Ford Coppola.  Gary Oldman's Count took on many guises: here we see both the ancient white-haired warlord and the youthful top-hatted predator.

Also related to the question of Dracula's appearance is the question of the appearance of the fifteenth-century figure named Dracula, Vlad Tepes of Wallachia, from whose infamy Stoker derived at least some inspiration and information.  So, of course I obsess about this, and earlier this year wrote a letter to Elizabeth Miller (respected scholar of literary, cinematic and historical Draculas) regarding Vlad's physiognomy.  An excerpt follows...

In general (and in my artwork) I am interested in how we create
history, interested in the inherent mutability of what is often presented as hard fact.  Good scholarship recognises that our knowledge of the past is intrinsically flawed and that the entire continuum of meaning must change as our knowledge increases.

My work often deals with how we construct identity from out of multiple viewpoints and how our understanding of identity is essentially incomplete.  Often I use images of Lugosi and Chaney as a springboard into this inquiry (see my Man of 1,000 Faces piece). In the last two years I've produced nearly 600 pieces of art, most of which incorporate those beloved icons of the horror film.

Anyway, I've been looking at the ubiquitous Dracula portrait from Castle Ambras all my life, in various reproductions, books, etc.  It is a very familiar image to me and has been for a long time, but I've never been very fond of it aesthetically.  Generally, I enjoy the idea of visual awkwardness, it has a kind of charm for me.  However, the awkwardness of the Ambras portrait has always disturbed me. There's something not quite right about it, something incomplete.  About 10 years ago I discovered a reproduction of the rondo painting from Stuttgart and found that I enjoyed the completeness and intentionality of that portrait.  The facial features are more grotesque and lifelike than the Ambras portrait which has a kind of physiologically inaccurate polish to the flesh.  Looking at the Ambras portrait one has the impression that the subject's head has been formed from a single lump of material.  You know that non-hardening modelling clay, Plasticene?  The surface of the face does nothing to convince me of an underlying structure; no bones, no blood or muscle under there.  Even the eyes appear to be of the same material as the rest of the face.  This is strange, since the Ambras portrait was supposedly painted during Dracula's lifetime (? or at least during the 1400s, right?) whereas the more lifelike Stuttgart portrait is from the 17th century.  Painted during his lifetime or not, the Ambras portrait and/or the painting on which it is based, was certainly not painted from life, but probably from description and/or memory.  More about that later.

I guess my big question is: What did Dracula actually look like?  I guess we so closely associate him with the Ambras portrait that we take his appearance as such for granted.  I have been inspired recently to look more closely at the visual material associated with Vlad's visage... I think this was due to my discovery (on the web) of another portrait of unknown origins (to Dr. Miller as well), based on the Ambras one but subtly different.


<the "new" portrait>

Possibly it was its reproduction as a black and white image (without the distraction of color) which intrigued me.  It (the "new" portrait, I'll call it) certainly lacks the awkwardness I perceived in the Ambras portrait, with the more stylized flattening of the face imbuing the portrait with even more Oriental elegance (not unlike that possessed by ancient Near Eastern, Assyrian sculptural relief friezes... see the image of Assurnasirpal (at right) if you are unfamiliar with this age of sculpture.  Notice the stylized arching brows, pronounced almond eyes, and even spiral-curling moustache resembling Vlad). Anyway, I printed out the "new" portrait at 81/2 x 11 size and was able to see more clearly in hard copy format what distinguishes it from the Ambras portrait.
 

• Vlad's gaze in the Ambras portrait is slightly uplifted, while the new portrait shows a more clearly side-long gaze.

• The new portrait also shows a sharpened, broader chin and a more flattened, relief-like treatment of the eyes and the ridge of the brows.  Also, the brows themselves read as more ridge-like, appearing to be almost hairless.  More about the brows later.

• The face itself has what I would characterise as more complex shadows than those depicted in the Ambras portrait, but not necessarily more realistic ones.  In fact, the structure of face is more flattened, stylized and abstract.  Most strange is the almost scar-like abstraction running from the brow vertically down his cheek almost to the moustache.  There is a strange, faintly triangular wedge which seems to generate out of the juncture of the "scar" and the edge of the curling moustache.  what happens in this area of the face doesn't describe anything anatomically accurate, but instead creates a marvelous kind of geometric absatraction making me wonder: why?  Why did the artist (presumably a portraitist very familiar with the structure of the human head and face) choose to solve that portion of the face with such a strange invention?  Aesthetically, I find it fascinating, and very unlike what occurs in the Ambras portrait in the corresponding portion of the face.  I have not come to any conclusions regarding this detail.  I wonder if it could be a depiction of a known sabre-scar of Vlad's (not an unlikely possibility given his years of Turkish imprisonment and subsequent battles with the Ottomans [on a coincidental and tangential note:  i am of Armenian descent, a race infamously persecuted by the Turks, and had a great-aunt who suffered a very similar scar inflicted by a Turkish sabre during the 1915 genocide]).  If so, then why does it not appear in the Ambras portrait (there are numerous reasons, of course, why it might not)?  This raises another question I have had: What is the orientation of the Ambras portrait?  I have seen it reproduced with Vlad looking both left and right... evincing the common phenomena of slide-flipping that can occur as images are reproduced and re-printed.  By ascertaining this we might be able to tell if we're seeing two different sides of his face in the two portraits.  I, of course, have no interest in jumping to any inaccurate conclusions.

• The hair (curly in the Ambras portrait) is treated very differently in the new portrait, reading almost as flat planes framing the face.  It looks almost like cloth hanging from the head-dress, Laurence of Arabia-style.

• Also noticeable is that the ostrich feathers are more recognizable as such than in the Ambras portrait (where I would never guess that those harsh verticals were feathers).  The slightly more "feathery" appearance seems to owe something to the Stuttgart rondo which depicts a head-dress with stylized but very recognizable feathers.  The new portrait, like the Ambras portrait, depicts the star/pearls/jewel/feather configuration in a very frontal way, making it parallel to the picture plane, while the rest of the head, face and figure are painted in a three-quarter view.  This is one reason why I don't think the Ambras portrait, or even possibly the (lost?) one it is based on, was painted from life.  Instead I imagine a sort of composite process took place with the star/pearls/jewel/feather configuration added to the rest of the portrait.  Maybe the artist was working from descriptions or direct memories of Dracula's garb and physiognomy.

• Niccolo Modrussa (reprinted in McNally/Florescu Dracula, Prince of Many Faces), who knew Dracula, describes him in part as "very stocky and strong... large wide-open green eyes; bushy black eyebrows... A bull's neck..."  It is hard to tell how much of this contradicts the new portrait (esp. eye color) but much of it does go against what is depicted in the Ambras portrait.  This also points us toward Dracula's suspected "stoutness".  I read somewhere that the positioning of the gold buttons on his tunic in the Ambras portrait belies at least a slightly swollen belly.  Given the composite nature of the portrait, strange lack of anatomical structure, and the awkward placement of the star/pearls/jewel/feather configuration it is hard to give creedence to anatomical depictions in this portrait.  If, however the placement of the buttons can be taken as any indication of Dracula's girth, the new portrait shows a third button that is either very illogically displaced or is indicative of a more distended belly than that hinted at in the Ambras portrait.  This potentially genetic predilection toward the "pot-belly" brings us to our only "known" portrait of his father Vlad Dracul which indeed shows a rather portly figure.  I wonder if the Sighisoara mural portrait (at left) is undoubtedly one of Vlad Dracul?  Is the resemblance to Dracula's arched eyebrows and moustache enough?  As for the moustache, I could grow one like that and it certainly would not make me part of the Dracula clan... for that matter, who says the son must share the father's facial hair proclivities?  Is this a Wallachian custom?  Or do we assume that Dracula chose to style his facial hair after his father, the very man who offered him to the Turks to be "butchered" (Dracul's own word). From the Modrussa quote we can ascertain that the brows depicted in the Ambras and related portraits do not match Dracula's actual physical appearance... there is a resemblance between the portraits of (the assumed)Dracul and (the known) Dracula, but is that enough to assume that one is the father of the other?  Could the similarity be due to some convention in depicting rulers of this time and place?  I'd like to see how the other figures are depicted in the mural.  McNally/Florescu shows only "Vlad" (perhaps to advance the theory).


I think I have the beginnings of a revisionist idea about Dracula's
appearance.  I wonder how much he truly resembled the Ambras portrait?  I am not as quick as Mcnally/Florescu to say that the Ambras portrait "matches" the existing descriptions of Vlad.  I have not even begun to consider the various woodcut images, which generally depict him as more haggard and puffy-faced, often bearded and seldom with the "Assyrian" spiral-curling moustache.  Are some known to portray a "young Vlad" and others a more middle-aged version (possibly more pot-bellied?).  And how do we explain that always strange lower lip?

I must make note of the fact that I have never seen a Dracula portrait first hand (but would love to) and am basing my reactions on the various reproductions which I have encountered (wherein the repros of the same source image often differ from each other) and am aware of the distrortions and croppings which occur in reproductions.  Of course, I must also disclaim that I am not a historian, so my research methods are far from impeccable.  I am reacting to these images as an artist, then attempting to understand them better through inquiry.  I am not arriving at any conclusions and hope that I am not creating or perpetuating any inaccuracies.

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