Posthumous Engraved Portrait of Maimonides (Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, circa 1744)

A posthumous engraved portrait claiming to show Maimonides, first published circa 1744 in Blasius Ugolinus's Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, an encyclopedic work printed in Venice. No contemporary likeness of Maimonides, who died in 1204, is known to survive, and peer-reviewed appraisal has found the face itself "utterly imaginative," an invented image by an unidentified artist, though the signature accompanying it has been separately verified as authentic against Cairo Genizah documents. Rediscovered and popularized in the nineteenth century by the scholar Yashar Reggio, it became, and remains, the standard portrait reproduced worldwide under Maimonides's name.