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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 ac

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.

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.