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Renaissance philosophers believed that God had created a harmonious cosmos bonded together mathematically. This intellectual approach was also embraced by some artists, who incorporated complex numerical and geometrical symbolism within their portraits.

Although Aristotle was often portrayed during the early modern period, his imagined appearance varied widely. When modern interpreters try to impose definitive meanings on pictures, they run the risk of overlooking symbolic resonances which can be just as significant as direct representation.

Sigmund Freud claimed to hate being photographed, yet he carefully fashioned his public image. Always immaculately dressed, he sported an old-fashioned beard that helped to establish his status as the founding father of psychoanalysis. An avid collector, Freud chose objects for their symbolic as well as their aesthetic interest.

In the middle of the 17th century, two founding fellows of the Royal Society -- John Evelyn and William Petty -- commissioned portraits of themselves with skulls. The paintings were commemorative, because Evelyn was celebrating his engagement and Petty had recently acquired an anatomical post at Oxford, but both sitters also intended their pictures to serve as reminders of mortality.

There are no established conventions for portraying scientific women. At the Royal Society, the first image of a female scientist was Henry Moore's drawing of Dorothy Hodgkin's hands, cruelly twisted by agonising arthritis. In her famous oil portrait, Maggi Hambling also focuses on Hodgkin's hands, thus symbolising the Nobel-prize winner's dedication to research and the importance of manual dexterity. Although Hambling's picture features a model of insulin, it is very different from photographs celebrating the discovery of DNA.

How do scientists become famous? Carl Linnaeus was an expert at self-promotion who used portraits to gain patronage and consolidate his reputation. His sexualized classification system was hugely controversial, yet his successors celebrated him as a great hero of botany.