[Roger Bacon, 1214?-1294, bust portrait, facing left]

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Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century English friar and natural philosopher, appears here in profile, turned to the left in a bust-length view typical of printed portraits of scholars. The engraving survives without a recorded date, so its exact moment of production is uncertain, but it likely belongs to the later rebirth of interest in Bacon during the early modern period, when writers and printmakers revived his reputation as an experimenter who championed observation and mathematics. Bacon's own works, written in Oxford and Paris, were admired in his lifetime and afterward for their ambition to join learning with practical inquiry, which explains why later artists chose to honor him with an image like this.

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