The Maimonides Portrait: An Appraisal of One of the World's Most Famous Pictures (Schwartz, Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal, 2011)

A peer-reviewed article by Yitzhack Schwartz in the Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal, volume 2, issue 3, 2011, article e0052, appraising the origin and authenticity of the standard engraved portrait of Maimonides. The article dates the engraving's first appearance to Blasius Ugolinus's 1744 encyclopedic work Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, published in Venice, finds the portrait itself "utterly imaginative" rather than an authentic likeness since no contemporary image of Maimonides, who died in 1204, is known to survive, but confirms the accompanying signature as genuine against Cairo Genizah documents. It records that the image was rediscovered and popularized in the nineteenth century by the scholar Yashar Reggio and became the worldwide standard Maimonides likeness by the early twentieth century.