An international team of scientists has revealed a facial approximation of what Saint Anthony of Padua, a Portuguese priest and the patron saint of lost and stolen articles, may have looked like, According to Live Science.
![Saint Anthony of Padua revealed in 3D facial approximation](https://archaeologymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Saint_Anthony_1.jpg)
The team created This lifelike face approximation of St. Anthony by using CT scans of the priest’s skull.
The final image depicts a man wearing a cap of thinning brown hair that crowns his head. The man is dressed in a brown robe, as were Franciscan friars in the Middle Ages.
“Today’s work is an update on the technique and shows a clear evolution from the 2014 face,” said Cícero Moraes, the study’s lead author and a Brazilian graphics expert who also worked on the 2014 reconstruction, in an email to Live Science.
![Saint Anthony of Padua revealed in 3D facial approximation](https://archaeologymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Saint_Anthony_2.jpg)
“The present approximation has greatly improved anatomical coherence…and is more compatible with a real face.”
In addition to the facial approximation, Moraes and his co-authors, Luca Bezzi, an Italian archaeologist, and Nichola Carrara, of the University of St. Anthony of Padua, also created a reconstruction of the endocranium, the base of the skull, which was very large in compared to the average human skull.
In other words, St. Anthony had a large head. “The fact is that this volume is large even compared to modern individuals,” Moraes said.
![Saint Anthony of Padua revealed in 3D facial approximation](https://archaeologymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Saint_Anthony_3.jpg)
Saint Anthony was born in 1195 in Portugal and died in 1231 in Arcella, Italy, at the age of 36, and was canonised a year later. A cast of his skull was made in 1981, in one of the exhumations of the saint’s body.