We can spend a lifetime reading histories of ancient Rome without knowing what any of its emperors looked like. Or rather, without knowing exactly what they looked like: being the leaders of the mightiest political entity in the Western world, they had their likenesses stamped onto coins and carved into busts as a matter of course. But such artist’s renderings inevitably come with a certain degree of artistic license, a tendency to mold features into slightly more imperial shapes. Seeing the faces of the Roman Emperors as we would if we were passing them on the street is an experience made possible only by high technology, and high technology developed sixteen centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire at that.
“Using the neural-net tool Artbreeder, Photoshop and historical references, I have created photoreal portraits of Roman Emperors,” writes designer Daniel Voshart. “For this project, I have transformed, or restored (cracks, noses, ears etc.) 800 images of busts to make the 54 emperors of The Principate (27 BC to 285 AD).”
The key technology that enables Artbreeder to convincingly blend images of faces together is what’s called a “generative adversarial network” (GAN). “Some call it Artificial Intelligence,” writes Voshart, “but it is more accurately described as Machine Learning.” The Verge’s James Vincent writes that Voshart fed in “images of emperors he collected from statues, coins, and paintings, and then tweaked the portraits manually based on historical descriptions, feeding them back to the GAN.”
Into the mix also went “high-res images of celebrities”: Daniel Craig into Augustus, André the Giant into Maximinus Thrax (thought to have been given his “a lantern jaw and mountainous frame” by a pituitary gland disorder like that which affected the colossal wrestler). This partially explains why some of these uncannily lifelike emperors — the biggest celebrities of their time and place, after all — look faintly familiar. Though modeled as closely as possible after men who really lived, these exact faces (much like those in the artificial intelligence-generated modern photographs previously featured here on Open Culture) have never actually existed. Still, one can imagine the emperors who inspired Voshart’s Principate recognizing themselves in it. But what would they make of the fact that it’s also selling briskly in poster form on Etsy?
Visit the Roman Emperor Project here. For background on this project, visit here.
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The History of Rome in 179 Podcasts
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Cant bring up piics larger and cant find captions indicating who they are. Is This my or my computers problem only? if so how to fix? Pls don’t publish my E mail. Thanks. K Wiley
They look like Republicans and Democrats. Some things never change.
An interesting exercise, but you can really see the effect of the general trend toward more stylized artistic renderings as portraiture strayed further from the verism that still held over from the Republican period (and which had a marked revival under the Flavians). Just look at the wide doe eyes and smooth blank faces of Volusianus, Florianus, Carus, Carinus, and Numeria compared to the grizzled and brutally frank visages of Galba and Vespasian.
The skin and hair might look realistic compared to marble, but the overall shapes and proportions of the later faces look more like those found in medieval icons than in real people. And it’s no wonder — figural representation in the Empire was already well on its way toward the medieval style in the third century when the portraits on which those reconstructions were based were made.
The fact they all look Scandinavian makes me instantly suspicious. This is just more Eurocentric nonsense.
Lucio Septimio Severo Pertinax quedó perfecto. incluso por sus bustos, grabados y textos descriptivos debió ser mucho más moreno.
mmm… May be look like
Posiblemente así lucian,más o menos de joven o edad madura. Hay otros que eran de origen árabe y africano.
They look scandinavian? What does a scandinavian look like? Unless you mean stereotypical nordic blond. Don’t agree with you. Septimus Severus, Caracalla,Geta, Hadrian, Florianus just as a few examples do not look scandinavian if by scandinavian you mean nordic. Explain your statement that these recreations are eurocentric nonsense.
They were black!
None of them look Scandinavian, they look Mediterranean & middle eastern lol wtf are you on?
Not all of them do? But also don’t know what you’re getting at because southern/Mediterranean Europeans are Europeans? And some southern/Mediterranean Europeans are pale, have blue eyes, have red hair, etc. My grandmother who is Sicilian and Greek is one of the palest people I know lol My friend from college who is Lebanese has red hair and green eyes… Stop putting people into genetic molds. I know that many emperors were born in other areas of the Empire, like Marcus Aurelius Antoninus who was Syrian. But come on, Rome started in Italy. Some of the emperors are going to look white-ish.
They were Romans.
They literally all have brown eyes.Romans were white. I have a friend from Persia, he considers himself Caucasian. His skin is more of a red tone with black hair and brown eyes.They were white. They weren’t middle eastern/arab or north african/egypitan. They had pale/olive skin color. Spanish and Sicilians had a lighter skin tone. Once the Islamic invasions occurred did their skin tone take on darker shades. Look how weak their chins look? Is that a typical Scandinavian trait? I do not think so. We know what they looked like, they had death masks made and an equestrian family had a room where all there ancestors faces were plastered on the wall. Get educated Les.
Agree. Given the geography where these men originated from and lived. And the fact that there were no easy routes to travel cross-country much less across the world.…
…all of them looking like VIKINGS staight-outta-valhalla is totally unrealistic.
Also, no obesity, no male pattern baldness, etc.
And another thing.…comparing your current “aunt” from Italy or “friend” from Lebanon to people from thousands of years ago who were mostly locked to their lands (meaning they all looked alike).…is a total joke.
That would be like saying all native americans in North America from 5000 years ago should look black with African features because my friend from Alabama last year is black and has African features.