German police artists show seamier side of Molière, Mozart and Shakespeare

Date of birth unknown ... booked for game poaching ... untraceable for a period of several years.

You only have to cast an eye over the personal details of Shakespeare, William, to see him as a pretty dodgy customer - the kind of person you might expect to turn up one day on a police wanted poster. In the event, it has taken almost four centuries.

The playwright is among cultural and historical luminaries whose wanted poster-style depictions are on show at an exhibition this week in Cologne.

The images were created by German police technicians using the same means that they use to produce real "wanted" portraits. But instead of using photos or sketches by police artists from accounts supplied by witnesses, the German federal police force, the BKA, has worked with contemporary portraits of artists supplied by the theatrical archive at Cologne University.

The idea came to the archive director, Professor Elmar Buck, while he was in New York during Mozart Year in 1991.

"There were depictions of Mozart everywhere. But they all looked like the pictures you see on the wrapping of the chocolate Mozart balls," he said.

The solemn young man who stares out from the best-known portraits of the composer scarcely hints at a man known to have been a merry drinker and enthusiastic partygoer, whose debts at the time of his death were worth five times his annual income. The exhibition, on the other hand, presents a man about whom you could believe all that - and more.

"The images show the subjects, not as they looked in the past, but as they would look today," said Prof Buck.

But he cautioned that "it is a cultural project. It has nothing to do with more recent information on the appearance of these people."

Depicting the great creative figures of the past as if they were men and women on the run has a firm basis in historical fact. The poet, novelist and play wright Gottfried Benn, who was also a doctor, once remarked - in a passage that features in the exhibition catalogue - that most of the high culture of the past 500 years had been created by "psychopaths, alcoholics, tramps, paupers, neurotics [and] degenerates".

But, clearly, a lot of people attending the display, which runs until the end of February, will be upset at seeing their heroes portrayed thus. If so, the organisers will feel thoroughly vindicated.

In his foreword to the catalogue, the head of the BKA, Klaus Ulrich Kersten, declares that its aim is to alter perceptions and "irritate as many people as possible".