This is what Saint Adalbert looked like, the archbishopric showed

Pthe likely appearance of the patron saint of the Prague archbishopric, Saint Adalbert, was revealed yesterday by representatives of the archbishopric and experts who participated in the research. First, they created a digital copy of the saint’s skull, which is part of the St. Vitus treasure. The shape was then estimated by scientists led by Cicero Moraes using information about the attachment of the cranial muscles and the thickness of the soft tissues according to the specific dimensions of the skull. Saint Adalbert lived in the second half of the 10th century, he was the second bishop of Prague. The unveiling of the image of the saint was part of the launch of the new publication Posunúté milénium, which maps the more than a thousand-year history of the archdiocese.

The digital copy of the saint’s skull was examined by a team of experts from the Czech Republic, Brazil, Poland and Australia led by the Brazilian Cicero Moraes. Among others, 3D designers, anthropologists or doctors contributed to the result. Czech geoinformatics scientist Jiří Šindelář and photographer Martin Frouz also worked on the digital estimation of the image of Saint Adalbert. “First, it was necessary to create a digital copy of the saint’s skull. This is done using the multi-frame photogrammetry method,” Šindelář said. The method consists in taking many photos of the skull that overlap and from which the program subsequently creates a 3D model.

The skull of St. Audrey is not preserved in its entirety, it is missing the lower jaw and part of the left cheek. According to Šindelář, before reconstructing the face, the skull needs to be completed, for which the method developed by the research team is used. By researching many skulls and faces, experts came up with new relationships and ratios between individual parts of the face. This allows them to better estimate the missing parts of the skull. According to Šindelář, the method has also found application in operating rooms, it is used by plastic surgeons, for example, to reconstruct a deformed face after a car accident.