👑 What Roman Emperors Looked Like in Real Life

If you've ever visited a museum of Greek or Roman art, you've probably seen rows of serene concrete busts. However, they have no pupils in their eyes, and they lack any color.
Haraund Binus brings dusty emperors back to life in a series of hyper-realistic illustrations. The guy from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, combines facial recognition AI, Photoshop, and historical references to bring all the Roman emperors from Augustus to Valentinian III to life.
The results are so accurate and lifelike that these ancient guys with their luxurious curls and sun-kissed skin could easily pass for A-list Hollywood actors.
Turning the stones of cold emperors into hyper-real flesh may seem like an impossible mission. But with the help of modern machine learning technologies, the images can be reconstructed and brought to life in colorful illustrations.
That’s exactly what Haraund did for his Roman emperor fun. Using AI, Photoshop, and historical references, he created these hyper-realistic illustrations that give us an idea of what great Roman emperors like Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus and Nero looked like in real life.
Haraund Binus said he used “superposition and simultaneous comparison” techniques that “allowed me to get these faces.” But facial features are only one part of the job.
To get an idea of the textures and colors, Haraund Binus researched the original historical sources. “The eyes, hair, and colors were based on quotes from Suetonius,” he wrote.
It’s not really clear how accurate the busts of the emperors are, since our best evidence of what they looked like is the busts themselves. However, we believe they are roughly accurate, since we now know that stylistically, the Romans favored realism in their sculptures dating back to the Republican period.
Beyond the busts, historical sources do reveal something about the people of the Roman Empire. For example, the Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, writing in the early imperial era, described some of the emperors in his notes.
According to Christie, Suetonius was very susceptible to physiognomic thinking and “may have been influenced by it in his description of Caligula’s fearsome appearance.” He was presented as the epitome of arbitrary cruelty and immoral excess, which is reflected in the description of Caligula’s face.
On the other side of the spectrum, there was a fair amount of heroic idealization of the most powerful men, and it’s likely that their busts did justice to their appearance. Who knows, maybe some of the most stunning busts were given the ancient equivalent of airbrushing? We may never know.

Source: boredpanda.