14 ms·

Using machine learning to recreate photorealistic portraits of Roman Emperors

356 points by elorant 6y ago

ericjang 6y ago
This is undoubtedly cool, but I worry quite a lot about people who aren't educated about ML interpreting these "historical renditions" as a "ground truth forensic". Rendering fossilized animals and coloring black and white photographs is also cool, but when you start to render the bone structure and "caucasian-ness" of statues, it starts to veer into some uncomfortable racial and ethnographic territory. What data and models were used to synthesize these predictions?
- michaelmior 6y ago
  This is absolutely true. It seems like the author did extensive research looking for information about physical features of each emperor to try to produce an accurate rendition. If you look in the links at the right of the page, you can find pretty good documentation on the sources used. I think the link below would actually be a better one for HN. https://medium.com/@voshart/photoreal-roman-emperor-project-236be7f06c8f https://medium.com/@voshart/photoreal-roman-emperor-project-...
  - bsanr 6y ago
    >Artistic interpretations are, by their nature, more art than science but I’ve made an effort to cross-reference their appearance (hair, eyes, ethnicity etc.) to historical texts and coinage. I have to agree with the grandparent, this seems like not very strong an underpinning for a project that clearly has the potential to be very controversial. There's no mention of accounting for the artist's potential implicit bias, the drift of ethnically-associated physiological features over the ~2000 years between the subjects and the data set that the process is based on, etc. For a long time now, I've felt that the best practice for this sort of presentation isn't necessarily a static image, but an interactive experience that allows viewers to explore a range of reasonable outputs.
    - michaelmior 6y ago
      I agree with the grandparent as well to a degree. The statement "I have created photoreal portraits of Roman Emperors" is tenuous at best. I'm not intending to suggest that the creator of this work didn't spend a significant amount of time and effort or that the end result isn't very impressive. But I do think a disclaimer is warranted in that there's no guarantee that the resulting images actually look like the emperors. I also agree that some type of interactive visualization would be great. But I think these images are very cool as well :)
    - throwaway316943 6y ago
      Aren’t there surviving Roman mosaics that show skin colour? There must also be written accounts and the time frame isn’t 2000 years because we have surviving paintings from several hundred years ago. All of this is just as bad as the racial theory that tried to recast history at the start of the 20th century. Disgusting.
- cik2e 6y ago
  You mention black and white colorization and that was my first thought upon seeing this. The statues are already super “photo-realistic” so I’m guessing this was a pretty similar process. On a completely different note, I am not sure what you’re getting at with the racial stuff. Like what are you suggesting? That perhaps some of the emperors weren’t totally Caucasian but rendering them as such from the best available evidence is somehow racist? In my humble opinion, trying to find racial undertones in every tangential thing is a distraction from the real conversations that we should be having. And there’s a real possibility of alienating people that are otherwise sympathetic to the cause.
  - mLuby 6y ago
    > trying to find racial undertones in every tangential thing In this case it isn't tangential but central, since the point is extrapolating physical appearance from incomplete data. It matters if the results predict inaccurate racial features because plenty of people unfortunately care about kind of thing. And remember that laypeople read "researchers used machine learning" as "super smart people used advanced science to get this result so it's probably true."
    - trav4225 6y ago
      But, isn't "extrapolating physical appearance from incomplete data" the entire point of this project?
      - GolDDranks 6y ago
        It is, but the criticism is that it's easy to misunderstand and/or skip over the "incomplete" part, and get a wrong conclusion that the results are more accurate than they actually are.
      - frereubu 6y ago
        My understanding of the original point is that ML models are trained on a data set. If you train the model on a data set that is only made up of white faces, the results will be whiter than if you train it on a data set that is made up solely of black faces. They said they'd like to know the makeup of the data set that the model is trained on to more fully understand how the results were produced.
- throwaway316943 6y ago
  What does it mean to “render the bone structure of statues” ? A statue is already a three dimensional rendering. Besides Caucasian bone structure is supposed to include all of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa which is pretty much the bounds of the Roman Empire. I don’t remember any black or Asian Roman emperors so I have no idea who you think is being excluded here.
  - elric 6y ago
    Not to mention that "bone structure" is not a fixed thing. The last 100 years or so, western skulls have seen a reduction in the size of jaw bones and sinuses, smaller mouths, narrower palates, etc. Apparently because we spend less time chewing on tough foods.
  - saeranv 6y ago
    I commented about this above, but the race of various Roman emperors is not as clear as we think due to the cosmopolitan nature of the region, and different (lack of?) racial constructs. I believe Septimus Severus, for example, might have been black.
- deleted 6y ago
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- ayyy 6y ago
  https://voshart.com/BIO https://voshart.com/BIO the artist appears to be pretty socially conscious based on his other work. Your comment frustrates me greatly because you are correct that people may internalize ML-generated images, and that's a real risk. ML already propagates racial bias within our prison system, as I'm sure you're aware. But Voshart's model isn't making decisions about employment or imprisonment, no, he's literally making art. Art needs to be allowed uncomfortable racial and ethnographic territory. If not art, what do you think should occupy that space? Art is supposed to be the domain where we get to try out all these ideas and give the public exposure to what things like ML-generated images can be. If this art made you feel something racial, try to do something positive with that. Maybe get involved solving some of the real life ML deployments that are already causing problems: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithms-criminal-justice-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm... But mostly, I hope when the author reads your comment, he doesn't feel discouraged that doing anything in public might risk his career. Or that someone thinking about publishing their own art doesn't look at it and go "hmm, too risky maybe, I better not". The chilling effects that comments like yours have is much more damaging than any racial bias you might be trying to raise awareness about. I remember when the conscious thing to do was to uplift the art of the unseen people in our world. I wish we could go back to that.
  - darkerside 6y ago
    Parent comment seemed like a discussion, not an attack. He started with, this is really cool. What is art for if not to provoke emotion and discussion? It gets into confusing territory when we talk about who is being "silenced" in a simple conversation where folks disagree, but I think the best outcome is that we sell to understand each other's points first, and then share our own. I hope I've demonstrated that here.
- deleted 6y ago
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- moksly 6y ago
  I think these things are mostly for interest generation articles and possible exhibitions at museums. Artists have been sculpin these things since before the digital age, and while doing it with ML is cool and all, the results aren’t really more historically useful than what the sculptors did. But hey, if it generates interest I don’t see anything wrong with it either. I wouldn’t be too worried about whether or not people view them as historical renditions. Most layman’s history “renditions” are mostly somewhat made up.
- teshier-A 6y ago
  Your comment sounds a bit like obscurantism ? The classic "You shouldn't do this, it's bad because you're biased. Besides, it's impossible to not be biased, so don't bother". Even though there are documented descriptions of the physical aspect of these people. https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-i-efa3c759d2b6 https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-...
  - deleted 6y ago
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- I_HALF_CATS 6y ago
  Creator here to answer: I have tried to make it clear in interviews these are not ground-truth representations. "each step towards realism is likely a step away from ground-truth." via https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/peer-past-these-photorealistic-portraits-roman-emperors-180975558/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/peer-past-these-ph... & https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1292107503543689217 https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1292107503543689217 I have not in my Roman Emperor write-up itself been as overt. I thought it might be a bit too obvious. My writeups make it clear when no information about skin tone is available. I did include such a clause in a forensic facial reconstruction experiment: saying: "My gut instinct is that the results are simply easier to look at, that each step towards realism is a step away from ground-truth skull measurements." because it was an experiment where there are likely living relatives. https://medium.com/forensic-vr/ai-forensic-facial-reconstruction-81fafe7d7191 https://medium.com/forensic-vr/ai-forensic-facial-reconstruc... Proof: https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1294977757756227585 https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1294977757756227585
  - ericjang 6y ago
    Thanks Daniel for your response! I hope my GP comment didn't come across as hostile or discouraging to future artists who want to explore this kind of art. I want to be clear that I'm not offended by your work. My discomfort stems more from my belief that a non-technical / layperson audience is much more likely to conflate "each step towards realism" with a "step towards ground-truth", the exact opposite to what you suggested. The writeups make clear when information is not available, but the artistic medium itself (a rendered still image showing only one possibility) does not showcase this. > In response to Cocci’s findings, Voshart removed all mentions of the site and revised several portraits to better reflect their subjects’ probable complexions You graciously made corrections for plausibly Nazi historical propaganda. However, not every artist/historian may elect to do this, out of scholarly pride or a personal politics or just laziness. The artist subsequently wields tremendous power over the images that show up on Google Image search, and their decisions may unintentionally contaminate future historical research by way of inducing subtle prejudices. We live in an age of misinformation - and I think the information that must be protected most carefully is information of the past, specifically around people. DeepFakes of living celebrities are fairly easy to verify and disprove, but as soon as you go back ~5 decades or so, some people start to challenge whether certain events (Holocaust, Tiananmen Square Massacre) even actually happened. Some ideas on how one might mitigate this: - Provenance technology that shows the editing history (potentially including a MD5 of the dataset) of how an image was synthesized. - A simple, unobtrusive watermark on the center of the image indicating that it is but one of N possibilities, where N gives a rough estimate of the entropy over the distribution. Sort of like the recycling triangle numbers. - GIF form showing multiple possibilities given the data you have.
- anm89 6y ago
  What is uncomfortable regarding making an educated guess as to the race or complexion of a historical figure? I think that is reqlly sad.
- woko 6y ago
  > What data and models were used to synthesize these predictions? You have to ask the creator of ArtBreeder (https://www.artbreeder.com/about https://www.artbreeder.com/about) which apparently uses BigGAN, StyleGAN, etc., trained on different datasets to offer these options: https://i.imgur.com/5jTNgXl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/5jTNgXl.jpg That being said, there is a heavy manual touch (based on "Photoshop and historical references"). See for instance how different Septimus can appear compared to the webpage: https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1290004339646517250 https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1290004339646517250
- HALtheWise 6y ago
  This is essentially the same issue with things like artists conception of dinosaurs. Lots of people probably have strong mental images of what color a T-Rex is, despite scientific evidence being very scant. Maybe "artist's conception" is a good term to put next to these sort of ML-generated images?
  - ericjang 6y ago
    Same technological challenges, but the rendering of past historical figures' ethnographic features has much higher social stakes and is a considerably more politically sensitive issue than how a T-Rex is rendered.
- garfieldnate 6y ago
  After your comment I was expecting to see all pale blonde pictures, but there was quite a variety in skin tone, hair color, etc. I remember reading that the Roman empire was diverse because of their history of conquering, but the extent of the diversity here really surprised me. ...Or were you saying that this is more diverse than is to be expected?
- mcv 6y ago
  Always good to keep in mind with these kind of ML reproductions: https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801/ph...
- Shorel 6y ago
  Historical writings. It is documented Caligula was a redhead.
mauritzio 6y ago
Too symmetric features in most cases to be true...imho
- strangeloops85 6y ago
  Yeah - the statues are not necessarily accurate depictions to begin with.
  - dwd 6y ago
    You would probably expect the artist to idealise the features to a degree for their health's sake. A Christiano Ronaldo statue would not go down well with any that had delusions of being a deity.
    - I_HALF_CATS 6y ago
      As the creator I must say there is a lot of misunderstanding in all the comments above but people are making many valid points. On a side-note you might be interested to see that I have tried to reconstruct that horrible Ronaldo statue. https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1287888497286750208 https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1287888497286750208
      - dwd 6y ago
        There's a ton of memes where people have skewed photos to look like the statue that are hideously amusing. The statue should have looked like what you produced: I can only guess bronze was hard to work with or redo when it goes horribly wrong.
- csomar 6y ago
  Not quite. Gordian II, Diduis Julianus, Philip The Arab. They do have clear eye-asymmetry that is quite common today. Maybe it was part of our evolution?
jpeg_hero 6y ago
This is coming very close to proving that Zuck is the Second Coming of Augustus.
narag 6y ago
I find Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero unconvincing, "too normal" to fit the troubled characters that I first knew of watching I, Claudius. Maybe I'm biased, but I feeel the difference even in the images that the reconstructions are based of. Augustus seems very well done.
- dhosek 6y ago
  Cinematic portrayals can color our mental images. My mental image of Cleopatra is Elizabeth Taylor, as ahistorical as that might be. The oddest along these lines in my head is that I always picture J. D. Salinger as James Earl Jones, thanks to Jones playing a character in Field of Dreams who, in the novel, was Salinger.
- thomasahle 6y ago
  Check the article on how each emperor was done: https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-i-efa3c759d2b6 https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-... I also thought Nero looked weird, but after seeing the other statues, and the historical descriptions, I think it's probably quite good!
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  I don't know, when I saw Caligula, I thought "Wow, that's exactly how I imagined he would look", like he had that same immature-yet-assholish look of Joffrey in Game of Thrones.
  - narag 6y ago
    The generated face seems a little wider. Also the eyes of all of them seem very calm. I expected more on the wild side.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Vespasian looks uncomfortably like Lyndon Johnson.
karlp 6y ago
Unlike other people I find the portraits surprisingly diverse, I expected to see very white faces considering most "realistic" representations are from white actors and white statues erase features. Not a perfect project but interesting.
- dwd 6y ago
  It would be interesting to compare the colourisations to where any of the emperors are known to have originated and whether they came from Northern or Southern Italian ancestry. A blued-eyed blonde from Northern Italy would be quite feasible. Also, later on many were not Italian at all.
- liability 6y ago
  Yeah a lot of those guys look pretty swarthy (e.g. like me.) I can't say I expected that. Caligula looks as I expected him though.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- dhosek 6y ago
  It's worth noting that classical statuary was typically painted and not left as blank white marble (the practice has persisted in some Catholic statuary). I doubt that any remaining pigment on statues (which might be recoverable through microscopy) was incorporated into the models for creating these images, but it would have been cool had it been. For more on the painting of ancient statues, see, e.g., https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh...
- riffraff 6y ago
  Roman emperors came from all over the empire, so the diversity is to be expected (e.g. Heliogabalus was from modern Syria, and there's noticeably Philip the Arab) What is odd here is that it's actually likely overdone, as the "blondies" in roman times were unusual enough that they were explicitly noted as such, e.g. Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix was noted as "his golden head of hair gave him a singular appearance". We have plenty of colored images from roman times through mosaics.
iandanforth 6y ago
Aurelius looks odd, most of his statues have him with much curlier hair.
pwned1 6y ago
Caligula looks hot. I’d date him.
jungletime 6y ago
Marcus Aurelius looks like a chill dude. Tallest to shortest?
murat124 6y ago
Here's what's said about Caligula[1]: > hair and beard worn long for a time after death of his sister. Humans are curious beings. If my memory serves right his sister died AFTER Caligula went nuts so at this point in his life he had already gone murderous after recovering from an almost fatal sickness (or poisoned) but when his sister died of fever his murderous psycho heart must have felt so broken (or perhaps felt a bit nihilist) he grew full beard. Maybe there's a human history of letting beards grow when shit happens. [1] https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-i-efa3c759d2b6 https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-...
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  growing a beard (and hair) to honour the dead is still practiced in southern greece at least
reddog 6y ago
These days we mostly make statues of football players and coaches (both real football and metric football). I guess these are as close as we get to emperors. But despite modern techniques for capturing a 3D image, they rarely look like the living counterparts. Nick Sabens statue looks more like Andy Griffith. Gary Patterson’s statue flatters by shaving off several pounds. Does anyone think the Rocky Balboa statue looks like Stallone? Is there any reason to think that the Roman emperors statues are any more true to life? Even if I was the most talented sculpture in the world, I know that if I was commissioned to do a statue of a still-living Caligula I wouldn’t include any warts.
- karmelapple 6y ago
  Seems like a good experiment for this tech: take some statues of people with known photographs, and see what imagery comes out.
- liability 6y ago
  > Does anyone think the Rocky Balboa statue looks like Stallone? (This is the only one of those I've seen in person.) I do actually. It's obviously not a perfect laser scan of his head, but I think it's quite clearly a depiction of the man, including the characteristic harsh lopsided nature of his face (which apparently is the result of nerve damage he sustained during birth.) That aspect of the statue is perhaps underplayed a bit, maybe out of respect, but I do think it's at least a recognizable reasonable depiction of him.
hliyan 6y ago
Noting down a weird phenomenon: I'm a huge admirer of Marcus Aurelius. His Meditations is sitting on the night stand next to me as I type this. But seeing him rendered this way somehow diminished the almost super-human image of him I had built up in my mind. He's just a man here.
- sarasasa28 6y ago
  you didn't get shit of his notes if you thought of him as a super-human
- saeranv 6y ago
  As you probably know, Marcus Aurelius would not have wanted you to think of him as a super-human! He writes a lot about his fallibility and his attempt to live a stoic life despite his failures.
  - hliyan 6y ago
    In my mind, that's what makes him "super-human" -- his ability to reflect upon himself is a skill that most average human beings don't possess.
- deleted 6y ago
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- seesawtron 6y ago
  A very modest looking man though which is exactly how he would have liked to look.
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  I share your study of Marcus Aurelius’ writings (diary style for his own benefit, happy accident that his writings survive to modern times). He believed in Summum Bonum, or ‘do the right thing.’
grawprog 6y ago
A lot of people seem to be taking the term 'photorealistic' a little bit too literally, when we say video games have photorealistic graphics, people don't assume they are literally photos of things. These are just 3d models of statues created to look as lifelike as a photo. Nothing more nothing less. They're no more accurate or not than the original statues. Unless we were to go back in time and physically see these people there's really no way to tell either way. It's just an interesting interpretation generated by some algorithms and a large sampling of data. It is what it is.
- thomasahle 6y ago
  > They're no more accurate or not than the original statues. Unless we were to go back in time and physically see these people there's really no way to tell either way. That's why the author uses multiple historical descriptions of the looks of each emperor. So he can make the pictures more accurate than the original statues. He also uses paintings and other statues for comparison.
TwoBit 6y ago
Most of the later emperors are listed there as "killed". Why be an emperor if you have an 80% chance of being murdered?
- vermilingua 6y ago
  Because for a time, you get to be emperor of Rome. We still know their names, and their faces, thousands of years past. 80% seems decent odds for that kind of immortal fame.
  - regularfry 6y ago
    What they knew at the time is that they would be gods. They also knew that they would become almost unimaginably rich.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    And compared to their successors in the title/office of pontifex maximus in certain later centuries, their annualized mortality rate wasn't even that bad.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Thing is, if you're the type that has the chance to become an emperor, you're "in the game anyway". I you don't become the emperor, you're still likely to be killed by the emperor or the potential emperor to remove a potential threat, just without the benefits of being the emperor and without the resources to try and protect yourself that being an emperor gives you.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  Yeah, I find it amusing/unsettling given the number of emperors who have their death notice something like "Killed by his own troops in favor of Next Emperor", then you go to the next emperor and it says "Killed by his own troops in favor of Next Next Emperor".
dhosek 6y ago
Interesting that Nero and Caligula resemble, more than anything else, frat boys.
- laichzeit0 6y ago
  It’s weird that no one in this thread is jumping onto this comment to point out how stereotyping the racial features of the frat boy stereotype is an unfair racially discriminating generalization /sarcasm.
- regularfry 6y ago
  They were young, well nourished, and not hugely into keeping fit.
- growlist 6y ago
  > frat boys Isn't this a hateful term?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Is it just me or does Augustus look a lot like Vladimir Putin?
- liability 6y ago
  I see it too; I think they both share a weak chin, long cheeks, and light hair/eyes.
skykooler 6y ago
I find it interesting how much some of them resemble current famous people (for example, Augustus who resembles Putin with more hair). I wonder how much of that has to do with celebrities possibly being more represented in the training data?
- riffraff 6y ago
  don't be fooled: this is a photorealistic rendering of statues and coins. We have pretty precise images of Augustus, except for colors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus#/media/File:Statue-Augustus.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus#/media/File:Statue-Au...
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > We have pretty precise images of Augustus, except for colors. What? We have many statues of Augustus, but they are known not to be modeled on Augustus. Those are images of some other random guy.
    - riffraff 6y ago
      what I mean is: it's not some ml software that came up with a putinesque visage, it's just a recoloring of the statue, which already had that nose, oval cheekbones etc.
mvn9 6y ago
Wasn't Gaius Julius Caesar [1] the first emperor? How come he is missing? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar
- ysw0 6y ago
  Caesar died before the Roman empire was established. His adopted son Augustus recreated the republic into an empire and is the first emperor.
- booleandilemma 6y ago
  The image of the emperors on the website has the header "Roman Emperors - The Principate" It begins with Augustus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principate
cblconfederate 6y ago
This is fantastic. Some of the reconstructions look convincingly italian. There is a slight bias towards making their faces more square than they are in statues (and probably RL too), e.g. Caligula. It's interesting to think that these emperors would find the obsession with exact skin tones in the comments here rather weird. Also, with great power comes a brutal way to die.
- regularfry 6y ago
  Fairly regularly at the hands of your own bodyguards, going by some of the later entries.
jl6 6y ago
What’s the consensus on whether Roman statues were intended to be realistic, or perhaps were idealizations, or even whether the statue makers had the ability to truly capture realistic features rather than work to a “type”? “Lely's painting style was, as was usual at the time, intended to flatter the sitter. Royalty in particular expected portraits to show them in the best possible light, if not to be outright fanciful. Lely's painting of Charles II shows what was expected of a painting of a head of state in the 17th century. It emphasizes the shapely royal calves - a prized fashion feature at that time.” https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/warts-and-all.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/warts-and-all.html
- Bayart 6y ago
  There's not one Roman style and there were wild variations across different eras. I'll skip the archaic and early Republican stuff because it's either too rough or derivative to be called specifically « Roman ». Late Republican busts are assumed to be very realistic. My understanding is that they're largely derived from mortuary masks made for the cult of ancestors that was prevalent at the time. It's obviously impossible to say how accurate they were without direct comparison to remains, but busts from that era show aging and « ugly » traits prominently. The Imperial era with its state-sponsored cult of personality started the trend towards idealism. Defects were smoothed out, people represented at their best and efforts were made to have them impersonate attitudes and virtues. The busts of the Pax Romana remain highly individualized and it's easy to tell a character from another, even though they always looks somewhat too good. It started getting weird with the Third Century Crisis, the Empire breaking up and the Tetrarchy. Portraiture became abstracted to the point it was more about representing the office that the person occupying it. Look up the sculpture of the Tetrarchs that's in Venice or the Colossus of Constantine, they're well known examples. Being a good fit for Christianity, that's the style that continued into the Middle Ages, and the reason why people assume that artists became terrible in « the Dark Ages ».
- usrusr 6y ago
  > What’s the consensus on whether Roman statues were intended to be realistic Would be a pity when people don't recognize you as the emperor when for some reason you are disconnected from your usual chain of command. Could those depictions have played a role that we would today describe as biometric fallback authentication? In that case they wouldn't want to overdo it with the idealization. Also, looking at it from a completely different angle: many Roman busts simply don't look very flattering at all, and to me those of emperors don't seem like a big exception.
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
This is super cool, but I have noticed blue eyes and hair, as that gene was extremely rare at that time, what kind of referees have you used? And one more thing I want to add, each time I see coloring of WW1 or WW2 or this one, suddenly that history becomes not so distant and those people do not look so technologically backward. On that note somehow war atrocities in my mind become unreal...
- ogogmad 6y ago
  According to one Quora answer [1], 10% of Italians have naturally blond hair and 30% of them have blue eyes. I don't see why Italians at that time should look much different to Italians today. [1] - https://www.quora.com/Are-blonde-hair-and-blue-eyes-quite-common-in-Italy https://www.quora.com/Are-blonde-hair-and-blue-eyes-quite-co...
  - bmn__ 6y ago
    Because it's historically ignorant? IANA ethnographer, but I expect that until the collapse of antiquity/migration period, only a vanishingly small part of the population did not share the most prevalent phænotype (dark hair etc.) in the cis-alpine part of the peninsula. I distinctly remember from school that blonde natural hair wigs were a prized possession among Latin female nobility because it was so rare to see and so difficult to obtain because of distance.
  - jaclaz 6y ago
    Maybe because in the several centuries in between some exchanges (mixed marriages) with the rest of Europe, including the northern countries where blue eyes and blond hair is more common took place?
    - deleted 6y ago
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WalterBright 6y ago
I bet those emperors would be quite pleased to know that millions see their faces two thousand years later.
Tainnor 6y ago
I hope you're gonna do the Dominate too. Would love to get a look at Diocletian or Constantine.
dbg31415 6y ago
In college we had a professor who went over some of the things these guys did in their spare time. This article sums it up a bit. Really helps to put a face to the name... =P https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-11-most-depraved-things-the-roman-emperors-ever-di-1479671517 https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-11-most-depraved-things-the-roma...
chkaloon 6y ago
I don't know, Gordian II's bust looks more like Pete Townsend than the ML version would indicate. Maybe it's the eye color.

356 points by elorant 6y ago

This is undoubtedly cool, but I worry quite a lot about people who aren't educated about ML interpreting these "historical renditions" as a "ground truth forensic". Rendering fossilized animals and coloring black and white photographs is also cool, but when you start to render the bone structure and "caucasian-ness" of statues, it starts to veer into some uncomfortable racial and ethnographic territory. What data and models were used to synthesize these predictions?

michaelmior 6y ago
This is absolutely true. It seems like the author did extensive research looking for information about physical features of each emperor to try to produce an accurate rendition. If you look in the links at the right of the page, you can find pretty good documentation on the sources used. I think the link below would actually be a better one for HN. https://medium.com/@voshart/photoreal-roman-emperor-project-236be7f06c8f https://medium.com/@voshart/photoreal-roman-emperor-project-...
- bsanr 6y ago
  >Artistic interpretations are, by their nature, more art than science but I’ve made an effort to cross-reference their appearance (hair, eyes, ethnicity etc.) to historical texts and coinage. I have to agree with the grandparent, this seems like not very strong an underpinning for a project that clearly has the potential to be very controversial. There's no mention of accounting for the artist's potential implicit bias, the drift of ethnically-associated physiological features over the ~2000 years between the subjects and the data set that the process is based on, etc. For a long time now, I've felt that the best practice for this sort of presentation isn't necessarily a static image, but an interactive experience that allows viewers to explore a range of reasonable outputs.
  - michaelmior 6y ago
    I agree with the grandparent as well to a degree. The statement "I have created photoreal portraits of Roman Emperors" is tenuous at best. I'm not intending to suggest that the creator of this work didn't spend a significant amount of time and effort or that the end result isn't very impressive. But I do think a disclaimer is warranted in that there's no guarantee that the resulting images actually look like the emperors. I also agree that some type of interactive visualization would be great. But I think these images are very cool as well :)
  - throwaway316943 6y ago
    Aren’t there surviving Roman mosaics that show skin colour? There must also be written accounts and the time frame isn’t 2000 years because we have surviving paintings from several hundred years ago. All of this is just as bad as the racial theory that tried to recast history at the start of the 20th century. Disgusting.
cik2e 6y ago
You mention black and white colorization and that was my first thought upon seeing this. The statues are already super “photo-realistic” so I’m guessing this was a pretty similar process. On a completely different note, I am not sure what you’re getting at with the racial stuff. Like what are you suggesting? That perhaps some of the emperors weren’t totally Caucasian but rendering them as such from the best available evidence is somehow racist? In my humble opinion, trying to find racial undertones in every tangential thing is a distraction from the real conversations that we should be having. And there’s a real possibility of alienating people that are otherwise sympathetic to the cause.
- mLuby 6y ago
  > trying to find racial undertones in every tangential thing In this case it isn't tangential but central, since the point is extrapolating physical appearance from incomplete data. It matters if the results predict inaccurate racial features because plenty of people unfortunately care about kind of thing. And remember that laypeople read "researchers used machine learning" as "super smart people used advanced science to get this result so it's probably true."
  - trav4225 6y ago
    But, isn't "extrapolating physical appearance from incomplete data" the entire point of this project?
    - GolDDranks 6y ago
      It is, but the criticism is that it's easy to misunderstand and/or skip over the "incomplete" part, and get a wrong conclusion that the results are more accurate than they actually are.
    - frereubu 6y ago
      My understanding of the original point is that ML models are trained on a data set. If you train the model on a data set that is only made up of white faces, the results will be whiter than if you train it on a data set that is made up solely of black faces. They said they'd like to know the makeup of the data set that the model is trained on to more fully understand how the results were produced.
throwaway316943 6y ago
What does it mean to “render the bone structure of statues” ? A statue is already a three dimensional rendering. Besides Caucasian bone structure is supposed to include all of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa which is pretty much the bounds of the Roman Empire. I don’t remember any black or Asian Roman emperors so I have no idea who you think is being excluded here.
- elric 6y ago
  Not to mention that "bone structure" is not a fixed thing. The last 100 years or so, western skulls have seen a reduction in the size of jaw bones and sinuses, smaller mouths, narrower palates, etc. Apparently because we spend less time chewing on tough foods.
- saeranv 6y ago
  I commented about this above, but the race of various Roman emperors is not as clear as we think due to the cosmopolitan nature of the region, and different (lack of?) racial constructs. I believe Septimus Severus, for example, might have been black.
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ayyy 6y ago
https://voshart.com/BIO https://voshart.com/BIO the artist appears to be pretty socially conscious based on his other work. Your comment frustrates me greatly because you are correct that people may internalize ML-generated images, and that's a real risk. ML already propagates racial bias within our prison system, as I'm sure you're aware. But Voshart's model isn't making decisions about employment or imprisonment, no, he's literally making art. Art needs to be allowed uncomfortable racial and ethnographic territory. If not art, what do you think should occupy that space? Art is supposed to be the domain where we get to try out all these ideas and give the public exposure to what things like ML-generated images can be. If this art made you feel something racial, try to do something positive with that. Maybe get involved solving some of the real life ML deployments that are already causing problems: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithms-criminal-justice-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm... But mostly, I hope when the author reads your comment, he doesn't feel discouraged that doing anything in public might risk his career. Or that someone thinking about publishing their own art doesn't look at it and go "hmm, too risky maybe, I better not". The chilling effects that comments like yours have is much more damaging than any racial bias you might be trying to raise awareness about. I remember when the conscious thing to do was to uplift the art of the unseen people in our world. I wish we could go back to that.
- darkerside 6y ago
  Parent comment seemed like a discussion, not an attack. He started with, this is really cool. What is art for if not to provoke emotion and discussion? It gets into confusing territory when we talk about who is being "silenced" in a simple conversation where folks disagree, but I think the best outcome is that we sell to understand each other's points first, and then share our own. I hope I've demonstrated that here.
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moksly 6y ago
I think these things are mostly for interest generation articles and possible exhibitions at museums. Artists have been sculpin these things since before the digital age, and while doing it with ML is cool and all, the results aren’t really more historically useful than what the sculptors did. But hey, if it generates interest I don’t see anything wrong with it either. I wouldn’t be too worried about whether or not people view them as historical renditions. Most layman’s history “renditions” are mostly somewhat made up.
teshier-A 6y ago
Your comment sounds a bit like obscurantism ? The classic "You shouldn't do this, it's bad because you're biased. Besides, it's impossible to not be biased, so don't bother". Even though there are documented descriptions of the physical aspect of these people. https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-i-efa3c759d2b6 https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-...
- deleted 6y ago
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I_HALF_CATS 6y ago
Creator here to answer: I have tried to make it clear in interviews these are not ground-truth representations. "each step towards realism is likely a step away from ground-truth." via https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/peer-past-these-photorealistic-portraits-roman-emperors-180975558/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/peer-past-these-ph... & https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1292107503543689217 https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1292107503543689217 I have not in my Roman Emperor write-up itself been as overt. I thought it might be a bit too obvious. My writeups make it clear when no information about skin tone is available. I did include such a clause in a forensic facial reconstruction experiment: saying: "My gut instinct is that the results are simply easier to look at, that each step towards realism is a step away from ground-truth skull measurements." because it was an experiment where there are likely living relatives. https://medium.com/forensic-vr/ai-forensic-facial-reconstruction-81fafe7d7191 https://medium.com/forensic-vr/ai-forensic-facial-reconstruc... Proof: https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1294977757756227585 https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1294977757756227585
- ericjang 6y ago
  Thanks Daniel for your response! I hope my GP comment didn't come across as hostile or discouraging to future artists who want to explore this kind of art. I want to be clear that I'm not offended by your work. My discomfort stems more from my belief that a non-technical / layperson audience is much more likely to conflate "each step towards realism" with a "step towards ground-truth", the exact opposite to what you suggested. The writeups make clear when information is not available, but the artistic medium itself (a rendered still image showing only one possibility) does not showcase this. > In response to Cocci’s findings, Voshart removed all mentions of the site and revised several portraits to better reflect their subjects’ probable complexions You graciously made corrections for plausibly Nazi historical propaganda. However, not every artist/historian may elect to do this, out of scholarly pride or a personal politics or just laziness. The artist subsequently wields tremendous power over the images that show up on Google Image search, and their decisions may unintentionally contaminate future historical research by way of inducing subtle prejudices. We live in an age of misinformation - and I think the information that must be protected most carefully is information of the past, specifically around people. DeepFakes of living celebrities are fairly easy to verify and disprove, but as soon as you go back ~5 decades or so, some people start to challenge whether certain events (Holocaust, Tiananmen Square Massacre) even actually happened. Some ideas on how one might mitigate this: - Provenance technology that shows the editing history (potentially including a MD5 of the dataset) of how an image was synthesized. - A simple, unobtrusive watermark on the center of the image indicating that it is but one of N possibilities, where N gives a rough estimate of the entropy over the distribution. Sort of like the recycling triangle numbers. - GIF form showing multiple possibilities given the data you have.
anm89 6y ago
What is uncomfortable regarding making an educated guess as to the race or complexion of a historical figure? I think that is reqlly sad.
woko 6y ago
> What data and models were used to synthesize these predictions? You have to ask the creator of ArtBreeder (https://www.artbreeder.com/about https://www.artbreeder.com/about) which apparently uses BigGAN, StyleGAN, etc., trained on different datasets to offer these options: https://i.imgur.com/5jTNgXl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/5jTNgXl.jpg That being said, there is a heavy manual touch (based on "Photoshop and historical references"). See for instance how different Septimus can appear compared to the webpage: https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1290004339646517250 https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1290004339646517250
HALtheWise 6y ago
This is essentially the same issue with things like artists conception of dinosaurs. Lots of people probably have strong mental images of what color a T-Rex is, despite scientific evidence being very scant. Maybe "artist's conception" is a good term to put next to these sort of ML-generated images?
- ericjang 6y ago
  Same technological challenges, but the rendering of past historical figures' ethnographic features has much higher social stakes and is a considerably more politically sensitive issue than how a T-Rex is rendered.
garfieldnate 6y ago
After your comment I was expecting to see all pale blonde pictures, but there was quite a variety in skin tone, hair color, etc. I remember reading that the Roman empire was diverse because of their history of conquering, but the extent of the diversity here really surprised me. ...Or were you saying that this is more diverse than is to be expected?
mcv 6y ago
Always good to keep in mind with these kind of ML reproductions: https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801/ph...
Shorel 6y ago
Historical writings. It is documented Caligula was a redhead.

mauritzio 6y ago

Too symmetric features in most cases to be true...imho

strangeloops85 6y ago
Yeah - the statues are not necessarily accurate depictions to begin with.
- dwd 6y ago
  You would probably expect the artist to idealise the features to a degree for their health's sake. A Christiano Ronaldo statue would not go down well with any that had delusions of being a deity.
  - I_HALF_CATS 6y ago
    As the creator I must say there is a lot of misunderstanding in all the comments above but people are making many valid points. On a side-note you might be interested to see that I have tried to reconstruct that horrible Ronaldo statue. https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1287888497286750208 https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1287888497286750208
    - dwd 6y ago
      There's a ton of memes where people have skewed photos to look like the statue that are hideously amusing. The statue should have looked like what you produced: I can only guess bronze was hard to work with or redo when it goes horribly wrong.
csomar 6y ago
Not quite. Gordian II, Diduis Julianus, Philip The Arab. They do have clear eye-asymmetry that is quite common today. Maybe it was part of our evolution?

jpeg_hero 6y ago

This is coming very close to proving that Zuck is the Second Coming of Augustus.

narag 6y ago

I find Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero unconvincing, "too normal" to fit the troubled characters that I first knew of watching I, Claudius. Maybe I'm biased, but I feeel the difference even in the images that the reconstructions are based of. Augustus seems very well done.

dhosek 6y ago
Cinematic portrayals can color our mental images. My mental image of Cleopatra is Elizabeth Taylor, as ahistorical as that might be. The oddest along these lines in my head is that I always picture J. D. Salinger as James Earl Jones, thanks to Jones playing a character in Field of Dreams who, in the novel, was Salinger.
thomasahle 6y ago
Check the article on how each emperor was done: https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-i-efa3c759d2b6 https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-... I also thought Nero looked weird, but after seeing the other statues, and the historical descriptions, I think it's probably quite good!
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I don't know, when I saw Caligula, I thought "Wow, that's exactly how I imagined he would look", like he had that same immature-yet-assholish look of Joffrey in Game of Thrones.
- narag 6y ago
  The generated face seems a little wider. Also the eyes of all of them seem very calm. I expected more on the wild side.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Vespasian looks uncomfortably like Lyndon Johnson.

karlp 6y ago

Unlike other people I find the portraits surprisingly diverse, I expected to see very white faces considering most "realistic" representations are from white actors and white statues erase features. Not a perfect project but interesting.

dwd 6y ago
It would be interesting to compare the colourisations to where any of the emperors are known to have originated and whether they came from Northern or Southern Italian ancestry. A blued-eyed blonde from Northern Italy would be quite feasible. Also, later on many were not Italian at all.
liability 6y ago
Yeah a lot of those guys look pretty swarthy (e.g. like me.) I can't say I expected that. Caligula looks as I expected him though.
- deleted 6y ago
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dhosek 6y ago
It's worth noting that classical statuary was typically painted and not left as blank white marble (the practice has persisted in some Catholic statuary). I doubt that any remaining pigment on statues (which might be recoverable through microscopy) was incorporated into the models for creating these images, but it would have been cool had it been. For more on the painting of ancient statues, see, e.g., https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh...
riffraff 6y ago
Roman emperors came from all over the empire, so the diversity is to be expected (e.g. Heliogabalus was from modern Syria, and there's noticeably Philip the Arab) What is odd here is that it's actually likely overdone, as the "blondies" in roman times were unusual enough that they were explicitly noted as such, e.g. Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix was noted as "his golden head of hair gave him a singular appearance". We have plenty of colored images from roman times through mosaics.

iandanforth 6y ago

Aurelius looks odd, most of his statues have him with much curlier hair.

pwned1 6y ago

Caligula looks hot. I’d date him.

jungletime 6y ago

Marcus Aurelius looks like a chill dude. Tallest to shortest?

murat124 6y ago

Here's what's said about Caligula[1]: > hair and beard worn long for a time after death of his sister. Humans are curious beings. If my memory serves right his sister died AFTER Caligula went nuts so at this point in his life he had already gone murderous after recovering from an almost fatal sickness (or poisoned) but when his sister died of fever his murderous psycho heart must have felt so broken (or perhaps felt a bit nihilist) he grew full beard. Maybe there's a human history of letting beards grow when shit happens. [1] https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-i-efa3c759d2b6 https://medium.com/@voshart/appearance-of-the-principate-pt-...

cblconfederate 6y ago
growing a beard (and hair) to honour the dead is still practiced in southern greece at least

reddog 6y ago

These days we mostly make statues of football players and coaches (both real football and metric football). I guess these are as close as we get to emperors. But despite modern techniques for capturing a 3D image, they rarely look like the living counterparts. Nick Sabens statue looks more like Andy Griffith. Gary Patterson’s statue flatters by shaving off several pounds. Does anyone think the Rocky Balboa statue looks like Stallone? Is there any reason to think that the Roman emperors statues are any more true to life? Even if I was the most talented sculpture in the world, I know that if I was commissioned to do a statue of a still-living Caligula I wouldn’t include any warts.

karmelapple 6y ago
Seems like a good experiment for this tech: take some statues of people with known photographs, and see what imagery comes out.
liability 6y ago
> Does anyone think the Rocky Balboa statue looks like Stallone? (This is the only one of those I've seen in person.) I do actually. It's obviously not a perfect laser scan of his head, but I think it's quite clearly a depiction of the man, including the characteristic harsh lopsided nature of his face (which apparently is the result of nerve damage he sustained during birth.) That aspect of the statue is perhaps underplayed a bit, maybe out of respect, but I do think it's at least a recognizable reasonable depiction of him.

hliyan 6y ago

Noting down a weird phenomenon: I'm a huge admirer of Marcus Aurelius. His Meditations is sitting on the night stand next to me as I type this. But seeing him rendered this way somehow diminished the almost super-human image of him I had built up in my mind. He's just a man here.

sarasasa28 6y ago
you didn't get shit of his notes if you thought of him as a super-human
saeranv 6y ago
As you probably know, Marcus Aurelius would not have wanted you to think of him as a super-human! He writes a lot about his fallibility and his attempt to live a stoic life despite his failures.
- hliyan 6y ago
  In my mind, that's what makes him "super-human" -- his ability to reflect upon himself is a skill that most average human beings don't possess.
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seesawtron 6y ago
A very modest looking man though which is exactly how he would have liked to look.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
I share your study of Marcus Aurelius’ writings (diary style for his own benefit, happy accident that his writings survive to modern times). He believed in Summum Bonum, or ‘do the right thing.’

grawprog 6y ago

A lot of people seem to be taking the term 'photorealistic' a little bit too literally, when we say video games have photorealistic graphics, people don't assume they are literally photos of things. These are just 3d models of statues created to look as lifelike as a photo. Nothing more nothing less. They're no more accurate or not than the original statues. Unless we were to go back in time and physically see these people there's really no way to tell either way. It's just an interesting interpretation generated by some algorithms and a large sampling of data. It is what it is.

thomasahle 6y ago
> They're no more accurate or not than the original statues. Unless we were to go back in time and physically see these people there's really no way to tell either way. That's why the author uses multiple historical descriptions of the looks of each emperor. So he can make the pictures more accurate than the original statues. He also uses paintings and other statues for comparison.

TwoBit 6y ago

Most of the later emperors are listed there as "killed". Why be an emperor if you have an 80% chance of being murdered?

vermilingua 6y ago
Because for a time, you get to be emperor of Rome. We still know their names, and their faces, thousands of years past. 80% seems decent odds for that kind of immortal fame.
- regularfry 6y ago
  What they knew at the time is that they would be gods. They also knew that they would become almost unimaginably rich.
- usrusr 6y ago
  And compared to their successors in the title/office of pontifex maximus in certain later centuries, their annualized mortality rate wasn't even that bad.
PeterisP 6y ago
Thing is, if you're the type that has the chance to become an emperor, you're "in the game anyway". I you don't become the emperor, you're still likely to be killed by the emperor or the potential emperor to remove a potential threat, just without the benefits of being the emperor and without the resources to try and protect yourself that being an emperor gives you.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
Yeah, I find it amusing/unsettling given the number of emperors who have their death notice something like "Killed by his own troops in favor of Next Emperor", then you go to the next emperor and it says "Killed by his own troops in favor of Next Next Emperor".

dhosek 6y ago

Interesting that Nero and Caligula resemble, more than anything else, frat boys.

laichzeit0 6y ago
It’s weird that no one in this thread is jumping onto this comment to point out how stereotyping the racial features of the frat boy stereotype is an unfair racially discriminating generalization /sarcasm.
regularfry 6y ago
They were young, well nourished, and not hugely into keeping fit.
growlist 6y ago
> frat boys Isn't this a hateful term?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

Is it just me or does Augustus look a lot like Vladimir Putin?

liability 6y ago
I see it too; I think they both share a weak chin, long cheeks, and light hair/eyes.

skykooler 6y ago

I find it interesting how much some of them resemble current famous people (for example, Augustus who resembles Putin with more hair). I wonder how much of that has to do with celebrities possibly being more represented in the training data?

riffraff 6y ago
don't be fooled: this is a photorealistic rendering of statues and coins. We have pretty precise images of Augustus, except for colors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus#/media/File:Statue-Augustus.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus#/media/File:Statue-Au...
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > We have pretty precise images of Augustus, except for colors. What? We have many statues of Augustus, but they are known not to be modeled on Augustus. Those are images of some other random guy.
  - riffraff 6y ago
    what I mean is: it's not some ml software that came up with a putinesque visage, it's just a recoloring of the statue, which already had that nose, oval cheekbones etc.

mvn9 6y ago

Wasn't Gaius Julius Caesar [1] the first emperor? How come he is missing? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar

ysw0 6y ago
Caesar died before the Roman empire was established. His adopted son Augustus recreated the republic into an empire and is the first emperor.
booleandilemma 6y ago
The image of the emperors on the website has the header "Roman Emperors - The Principate" It begins with Augustus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principate

cblconfederate 6y ago

This is fantastic. Some of the reconstructions look convincingly italian. There is a slight bias towards making their faces more square than they are in statues (and probably RL too), e.g. Caligula. It's interesting to think that these emperors would find the obsession with exact skin tones in the comments here rather weird. Also, with great power comes a brutal way to die.

regularfry 6y ago
Fairly regularly at the hands of your own bodyguards, going by some of the later entries.

jl6 6y ago

What’s the consensus on whether Roman statues were intended to be realistic, or perhaps were idealizations, or even whether the statue makers had the ability to truly capture realistic features rather than work to a “type”? “Lely's painting style was, as was usual at the time, intended to flatter the sitter. Royalty in particular expected portraits to show them in the best possible light, if not to be outright fanciful. Lely's painting of Charles II shows what was expected of a painting of a head of state in the 17th century. It emphasizes the shapely royal calves - a prized fashion feature at that time.” https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/warts-and-all.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/warts-and-all.html

Bayart 6y ago
There's not one Roman style and there were wild variations across different eras. I'll skip the archaic and early Republican stuff because it's either too rough or derivative to be called specifically « Roman ». Late Republican busts are assumed to be very realistic. My understanding is that they're largely derived from mortuary masks made for the cult of ancestors that was prevalent at the time. It's obviously impossible to say how accurate they were without direct comparison to remains, but busts from that era show aging and « ugly » traits prominently. The Imperial era with its state-sponsored cult of personality started the trend towards idealism. Defects were smoothed out, people represented at their best and efforts were made to have them impersonate attitudes and virtues. The busts of the Pax Romana remain highly individualized and it's easy to tell a character from another, even though they always looks somewhat too good. It started getting weird with the Third Century Crisis, the Empire breaking up and the Tetrarchy. Portraiture became abstracted to the point it was more about representing the office that the person occupying it. Look up the sculpture of the Tetrarchs that's in Venice or the Colossus of Constantine, they're well known examples. Being a good fit for Christianity, that's the style that continued into the Middle Ages, and the reason why people assume that artists became terrible in « the Dark Ages ».
usrusr 6y ago
> What’s the consensus on whether Roman statues were intended to be realistic Would be a pity when people don't recognize you as the emperor when for some reason you are disconnected from your usual chain of command. Could those depictions have played a role that we would today describe as biometric fallback authentication? In that case they wouldn't want to overdo it with the idealization. Also, looking at it from a completely different angle: many Roman busts simply don't look very flattering at all, and to me those of emperors don't seem like a big exception.

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago

This is super cool, but I have noticed blue eyes and hair, as that gene was extremely rare at that time, what kind of referees have you used? And one more thing I want to add, each time I see coloring of WW1 or WW2 or this one, suddenly that history becomes not so distant and those people do not look so technologically backward. On that note somehow war atrocities in my mind become unreal...

ogogmad 6y ago
According to one Quora answer [1], 10% of Italians have naturally blond hair and 30% of them have blue eyes. I don't see why Italians at that time should look much different to Italians today. [1] - https://www.quora.com/Are-blonde-hair-and-blue-eyes-quite-common-in-Italy https://www.quora.com/Are-blonde-hair-and-blue-eyes-quite-co...
- bmn__ 6y ago
  Because it's historically ignorant? IANA ethnographer, but I expect that until the collapse of antiquity/migration period, only a vanishingly small part of the population did not share the most prevalent phænotype (dark hair etc.) in the cis-alpine part of the peninsula. I distinctly remember from school that blonde natural hair wigs were a prized possession among Latin female nobility because it was so rare to see and so difficult to obtain because of distance.
- jaclaz 6y ago
  Maybe because in the several centuries in between some exchanges (mixed marriages) with the rest of Europe, including the northern countries where blue eyes and blond hair is more common took place?
  - deleted 6y ago
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WalterBright 6y ago

I bet those emperors would be quite pleased to know that millions see their faces two thousand years later.

Tainnor 6y ago

I hope you're gonna do the Dominate too. Would love to get a look at Diocletian or Constantine.

dbg31415 6y ago

In college we had a professor who went over some of the things these guys did in their spare time. This article sums it up a bit. Really helps to put a face to the name... =P https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-11-most-depraved-things-the-roman-emperors-ever-di-1479671517 https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-11-most-depraved-things-the-roma...

chkaloon 6y ago

I don't know, Gordian II's bust looks more like Pete Townsend than the ML version would indicate. Maybe it's the eye color.