Latest 3D technology reveals secrets of Henry VII's funeral effigy head
Monday, 17th February 2025
Westminster Abbey is undertaking a new project using the latest 3D technology to scan the funeral effigy head of Henry VII - the first Tudor monarch and the father of Henry VIII.
The head was last scanned in the 1980s and the new project, run in partnership with digital heritage studio ThinkSee 3D, aims to improve our understanding about how it could have been created.
Thought to be the work of the Italian Renaissance sculptor Pietro Torrigiano - who came to England after leaving Florence in around 1509-10 - the funeral effigy head is startlingly realistic and one of the most popular items on display in the Abbey museum, The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries.
Lifelike results
Previous research in the 1980s concluded that Torrigiano must have used a model from Henry VII’s death mask to achieve such lifelike results. A death mask is a likeness, typically wax or plaster of a person's face, made after their death by taking a cast from the corpse and documents show that they were used to create funeral effigies.
The head is the last surviving element Henry's effigy, which was carried on top of his coffin. It was made of straw and wood with a padding of hay covered with canvas and then plaster. Saturated by water during the blitz in the Second World War the effigy disintegrated leaving only the head. Henry died on 21st April 1509 and lies buried in a vault beneath a magnificent tomb in the Abbey’s Lady Chapel, also designed by Torrigiano (below).
High resolution modelling
ThinkSee 3D are using a method called photogrammetry to scan the effigy. Photogrammetry software converts multiple digital photographs taken all around an artefact into a digital 3D model by looking at multiple surface features on the object and seeing how they seemingly shift from image to image. This apparent shift in the position of a feature allows the software, through triangulation, to determine the depth of that feature. By doing this for hundreds or even thousands of features on an object, it is possible to define an entire surface in 3D. Additionally, the photos can be painted back onto the surface to give the digital model a photographic texture. A good quality digital camera with flash and specialist filters is used to capture several hundred photos during a scan which are then processed later into the high resolution 3D model.
With the use of the latest high resolution modelling, the results of which are planned to be released later this year, it is hoped that a firmer link can be made between Henry VII’s death mask and Torrigiano’s work.
The tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York and a terracotta bust of Henry VII by Torrigiano in the V&A’s collection are also being scanned for the project.
The Abbey's Curator, Dr Susan Jenkins, said:
Visitors to the Abbey’s Galleries are fascinated by how life-like Henry VII’s funeral effigy head is. We now hope to prove that sculptor Pietro Torrigiano moulded it from the same death mask that he used for the V&A’s contemporaneous terracotta bust of the king and his magnificent gilt-bronze tomb monument in the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey.
