I find the coolest stuff doing image research. Often it has nothing to do with the book I’m researching at the moment, but it’s what makes my job so awesome. Case in point: I stumbled across this portrait of the composer Christoph Willibald von Gluck, (1714 -1787) by the painter Joseph Duplessis, painted around 1775. And I was amazed—are those smallpox scars on his face?Smallpox was the scourge of the eighteenth century, and vast numbers of people who managed to survive the disease were scarred with pitted faces, but you so rarely see such realistic depictions in portraits from the time. (For instance, George Washington survived smallpox, but Gilbert Stuart, his go-to portraitist from about the same era as Duplessis, painted GW with a smooth countenance.)I’ve always liked Gluck (here’s one of his more famous pieces). I looked him up, and sure enough, Gluck had had smallpox, and his face was badly scarred. Then I found another depiction of him, by the sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon. Woah.