Legacy Looks

 

The collective perception of cultural icons is sometimes a distortion of what they actually looked like. For example, the collective representative image of J.S. Bach that we all have is of him wearing a wig and holding a small hymn of some kind. He's probably in his 60s at that point but you can find various renderings and send-ups of what he might have looked like at a younger age--for example, him holding a Strat (that's interesting as well because the Strat is the guitar of choice). The depictions of Jesus in Roman statuary looked more like an androgynous Apollo in his late teens or early 20s. The collective image of Jesus is of a man in his 60s, not 30s. Ironically, long hair and a beard can sometimes make a man look more youthful because of the "rock star" effect. (If Geddy Lee cut his hair short and stopped dying it he would definitely look his age or older. Wearing dark glasses takes a decade or two off. Bach wearing shades does this).

Even for people currently living, we see them in a certain way when there are probably more accurate ways that we could see them. But we have an internal collective (unconscious) vision of what people look like having not seen them in person. Archetypes determine how we see. They are the lenses that we use collectively to understand how people look--essentially the Fundamental Attribution Error.