A few to get things going ...


(Socrates and Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins CBE)


(Keith Richards and Ramses II - though at least Ramses has a good excuse)


(Rupert Grint and Sir David Wilkie, 19th century portrait painter)

Sly Stallone turns up in a 16th century painting [exteme left]

Great one Trike! That fresco in the Vatican, "The Cardinal and Theological Virtues", was designed by Raphael but actually painted by a guy who went by the fantastic name Lorenzo Lotto. If he was alive today I wonder what he'd be doing ...

This one's weird.


President William Howard Taft and Kathy Bates without the 'tash)

(Neville Chamberlain and Rowan Atkinson)

(Arthur Schopenhauer just after publishing "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason" at age 25, and Johnny Depp around the same age after just finishing "Benny and Joon")

(Samuel Pepys and Alex Salmond)

New Kingdom woman / Michael Jackson

(William Shakespeare and Antony Sher)

George Washington and Michael Douglas.

Oscar Wilde and Hugh Grant.

Filippo Strozzi / Patrick Stewart

NO, no, no. Here's the real thing. The genuine Taggart.

Rudolph Steiner and Jeremy Irons.

Sorry, but I just couldn't resist:



Anne of Cleves and my golden retriever 'Pooch'...... Henry did say he thought Anne looked like a right dog, or words to that effect.

Actually Pooch has just had an op on his ear so at the moment he's swaddled up in bandages and looks more like a be-wimpled Elizabeth Woodville.

An 1800 year old Roman bust;



I wonder if he had blue suede sandals

(Ulysses S Grant and Robin Williams)

Emperor Hadrian David Blunkett

Millard Fillimore, last Whig president of the USA and Alec Baldwin (recent vintage)

Blimey, Alec Baldwin's chubbed out, I didn't recognise him.

On the right is Georg Pencz's "Portrait of a Seated Youth" from 1544. On the left is "Portrait of a Tweeted Youth", the billionaire founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerburg.

Boris Johnson and Charles Brandon third Duke of Suffolk who might have grown up to look even more like Boris if he'd only lived a bit longer.

Reading today's obituaries of Cynthia Payne I was rather struck by how much she resembled the Iron Lady:

Maggie and Madam Cyn - had they only swapped roles, how much better this country might have been today.

Paul Revere and Jack Black;

It looks like Lord Lucan never got any further than the notorious 'Queen's Head' pub in Brighton, and then lived out the rest of his days as the flamboyant lead singer of a successful rock group:



Or were they perhaps always related?

.... I rather think we should be told.

The things you find when searching for Quiz answers:

Who's Harry Shearer?

He does voiceovers for "The Simpsons", just as Thomas Paine did voiceovers for the American Revolution:

Burn the infidel!!!! She does not worship Spinal Tap!! She is a heathenish MOR person!!!! Death to the non-tapper!!!!

(as a tiny Stonehenge descends from the ceiling and several leprechauns enter river-dancing from stage left)

Guilty as charged I'm afraid. My sort-of son-in-law, he being the possessor 17 stringed instruments, considers me as some kind of moral and spiritual defective for my lukewarm relationship with music.
He's almost certainly correct.

When you do listen to music you probably only turn up to 10 too.

Sheesh!

I've just noticed the facial similarity between the current US National Security Advisor, John Bolton, and the British actor and comedian, Richard Hearne, aka Mr Pastry. I wonder if perchance they are related?

   

The Arnolfini Portrait





Vladimir Putin



Spooky:

Nicolas Cage and Tennessee Man from 1870:

Triceratops wrote:

The Arnolfini Portrait

In an age when fake eyelashes and artificially thick eyebrows seem to be standard issue, very few women today look like the Arnolfini bride. English actress Andrea Riseborough, however, bucks that trend and also looks remarkably like the 15th century ‘girl in a green gown’.

Still further to Vladimir Putin (or at least one of his many doubles) being spotted in the Arnolfini portrait, I see that his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov may also have been a visitor to late-renaissance Flanders, or at least so it seems from this famous portrait by Quinten-Massys (1465-1530):

      

Interestingly there's an on-going debate that the so-called "Ugly Duchess" may not in fact have been an old woman, possibly displaying the physical effects of Paget's disease, but was actually an elderly male transvestite, and indeed with the painting possibly depicting a very specific person: The Guardian (11/03/2003): "She is a he ....".  

So was the famous Old Duchess actually an Old Queen?

Maybe its something to do with a conductor's baton resembling a magician's wand but I was struck by the similarity between Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) and the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich when they were of a similar age.

       

For all their similarly ferocious and sultry looks, Harry Potter faced nothing more fearsome than the ficticious Voldemort, while Shostakovich faced a lifetime of dealing with the very real evil of Joseph Stalin.

It's probably cheating to mention an actor since portraying someone else is what they do, nevertheless whenever I see Kenneth Branagh in his role as Gilderoy Lockhart (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) he always reminds me of King George IV. Besides the physical resemblence both men were vain and very much in love with themselves.

      

I didn't realise KB was vain, MM.  Still if people are being told they are wonderful all the time maybe they come to believe it. There definitely is a resemblance.

I actually meant in his role as Gilderoy Lockhart, hence my comment about it being rather a cheat to compare an historic personality to a ficticious figure played by an actor. Do you not think there's a resemblance between Branagh/Lockhart and old Prinny? Maybe it is just me.

Yes they do look alike where KB is playing that particular role, MM.

I sometimes think that BBC presenter Jeremy Vine looks like Isaac Newton without the wig:

And Isaac Newton never road a bike, either..... well, not in a wig, anyway.