What did Joan of Arc look like? No one drew her from life — or if they did, it doesn’t survive. The only contemporary image is a marginal sketch by Clément de Fauquembergue, a clerk of the Parlement de Paris, who doodled a woman with a banner in the margin of his register on 10 May 1429 when news of the siege of Orléans reached Paris. He had never seen Joan. The sketch shows a generic woman in a dress holding a sword and banner. It tells us nothing about her actual appearance.
What we do have is extensive trial testimony. Joan was tried by an ecclesiastical court at Rouen in 1431, and her rehabilitation trial in 1456 collected sworn depositions from dozens of people who knew her. From these records, a consistent picture emerges: she was short, sturdy, and strong, with dark hair she kept cropped short above her ears in a masculine style. She wore men’s clothing almost exclusively — doublet, hose, and armour — and this was one of the charges at her trial. Multiple witnesses describe her as robust and capable of enduring the physical demands of campaign life.
Her face is barely described. The rehabilitation witnesses call her “beautiful and well-formed” in the formulaic language of medieval hagiography, which tells us little. Her skin colour, eye colour, and precise features are not recorded in any surviving source. We know she was young — about 19 when she died — and that she was a peasant from Domrémy, which gives a probable northern French complexion, but nothing more specific. This is an honest reconstruction from very limited evidence.
