Secondary sourcePainting

Portrait of Rhazes

An early modern European imagined portrait of Rhazes, typical of how he was pictured among the great physicians.

An imagined later portrait representing Rhazes as he was remembered in European collections of famous physicians.

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Portrait of Rhazes (al-Razi). Wellcome Collection.

About this source

What it is

This is a printed portrait held by the Wellcome Collection, showing a bearded man in a turban in profile, with Persian script beneath naming him Muhammad Zakariya Razi. It is an imagined likeness made long after his lifetime, not a portrait drawn from life.

Why it matters

No real portrait of Rhazes survives from his own time, so later artists and printmakers invented images like this one to represent him as a scholar worth remembering. Such portraits were common in European collections celebrating famous physicians and alchemists from history.

Look closer

Since this was made centuries after Rhazes lived, what can it actually tell us about him?
Why do you think the artist chose to show him in a turban, facing to the side?
What does it mean when a print like this becomes the image people think of when they imagine Rhazes?

This painting is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Al-Razi on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.