Celebrity has always existed in one form or another. Across history, the likeness of kings, queens and nobility, deities, popes, and saints have been the subject of countless works of art.
Painted portraits, carvings in walls, verses in songs and stanzas in poems stand as testament to our enduring fascination with the human face. Some faces, such as that belonging to Helen of Troy, were so famous they are claimed, as English poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe wrote, to have “launched a thousand ships”.
