[Live Science is among the many publications reporting on a project to create presence-evoking portraits of Roman Emperors; see the original story for more photos. Excerpts from some of the other coverage that add more details and raise additional issues about efforts like this follow below. –Matthew]
[Image: A description of Caligula said the emperor had “a glare savage enough to torture.” Credit: Courtesy of Daniel Voshart/The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
AI ‘resurrects’ 54 Roman emperors, in stunningly lifelike images
An artist used machine learning to create the photorealistic portraits.
By Mindy Weisberger
September 28, 2020
Ancient Roman emperors’ faces have been brought to life in digital reconstructions; the unnervingly realistic image project includes the Emperors Caligula, Nero and Hadrian, among others.
The features of these long-dead rulers have been preserved in hundreds of sculptures, but even the most detailed carvings can’t convey what these men truly looked like when they were alive. To explore that, Canadian cinematographer and virtual reality designer Daniel Voshart used machine learning — computer algorithms that learn through experience — in a neural network, a computing system processes information through hierarchies of nodes that communicate in a manner similar to neurons in a brain.
In the neural net, called Artbreeder, algorithms analyzed about 800 busts to model more realistic facial shapes, features, hair and skin, and to add vivid color. Voshart then fine-tuned Artbreeder’s models using Photoshop, adding details gleaned from coins, artworks and written descriptions of the emperors from historical texts, to make the portraits really come to life.
“There is a rule of thumb in computer programming called ‘garbage in garbage out,’ and it applies to Artbreeder,” Voshart told Live Science in an email. “A well-lit, well-sculpted bust with little damage and standard face features is going to be quite easy to get a result.” In contrast, a dataset including damaged sculptures or ones photographed under poor lighting can produce proverbial “garbage” images that aren’t very realistic.
The busts that Voshart preferred to use as the primary sources were carved when their emperor subject was still alive, or were the most skillfully made, he said in a blog post.
For skin color, Voshart would either provide Artbreeder with a colorized reference image, or let it “guess” how to distribute hues so that the surface of the model resembled realistic human skin.
“I can change skin tone and change ethnicity somewhat with manual controls,” he said.
Tracking down all the art and reference text for the emperors took approximately two months, and assembling each portrait required about 15 to 16 hours on average, Voshart told Live Science.
For the emperor Caligula, who ruled from A.D. 37 to 41, Voshart adjusted the Artbreeder model using descriptions that included “head misshapen, eyes and temples sunken,” and “eyes staring and with a glare savage enough to torture,” from a paper titled “Personal Appearance in the Biography of the Roman Emperors,” published in 1928 in the journal Studies in Philology.
Nero, emperor from A.D. 54 to 68, had a more rounded jaw, skin that was “freckled and repulsive,” and a face that was “agreeable rather than attractive,” according to the 1928 paper.
When Voshart began the Roman Emperor Project as a distraction during the COVID-19 quarantine, his knowledge of the ancient emperors was “close to zero,” he said. Nevertheless, what started as a diverting art experiment intrigued Voshart enough to eventually include 54 emperors, spanning a period in the Roman Empire that is sometimes called the Principate, from 27 B.C. to A.D. 285, he wrote on his website.
Knowing little about his subjects was actually a plus, allowing him to shape their faces without preconceptions or bias, Voshart said.
“In a forensic reconstruction, for example, you only want relevant information about hair, skin, known scars,” and other physical features, Voshart explained. “Knowing aspects of personality can unduly influence an artist,” leading them to craft a portrait that reflects a skewed perception of the subject, he said.
You can see more of Voshart’s reconstructions on his website, and a poster of the 54 faces in the Roman Emperor Project is available at his Etsy store.
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[From My Modern Met]
“Apart from them being stunning works of art, these digital likenesses of ancient people offer a chance to contemplate history on a personal level.”
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[From The Verge]
“Voshart says his aim wasn’t to simply copy the statues in flesh but to create portraits that looked convincing in their own right, each of which takes a day to design. ‘What I’m doing is an artistic interpretation of an artistic interpretation,’ he says.
To help, he says he sometimes fed high-res images of celebrities into the GAN to heighten the realism. There’s a touch of Daniel Craig in his Augustus, for example, while to create the portrait of Maximinus Thrax he fed in images of the wrestler André the Giant. The reason for this, Voshart explains, is that Thrax is thought to have had a pituitary gland disorder in his youth, giving him a lantern jaw and mountainous frame. André the Giant (real name André René Roussimoff) was diagnosed with the same disorder, so Voshart wanted to borrow the wrestler’s features to thicken Thrax’s jaw and brow. The process, as he describes it, is almost alchemical, relying on a careful mix of inputs to create the finished product.
[…]
[H]is work is already enticing academics, who have praised the portraits for giving the emperors new depth and realism. Voshart says he chats with a group of history professors and PhDs who’ve given him guidance on certain figures.
[…]
As a sort of thank you to his advisers, Voshart has even used a picture of one USC assistant professor who looks quite a bit like the emperor Numerian to create the ancient ruler’s portrait. And who knows, perhaps this rendition of Numerian will be one that survives down the years. It’ll be yet another artistic depiction for future historians to argue about.”
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[From Smithsonian Magazine]
“To determine the Roman rulers’ likely skin tone and hair color, Voshart studied historical records and looked to the men’s birthplaces and lineages, ultimately making an educated guess. But as Italian researcher Davide Cocci pointed out in a Medium blog post last month, one of the sources cited in Voshart’s original list of references was actually a neo-Nazi site that suggested certain emperors had blonde hair and similarly fair features. Though Cocci acknowledged that some emperors may have been blonde, he emphasized the source’s ‘clearly politically motivated’ nature and reliance on earlier propaganda accounts.
In response to Cocci’s findings, Voshart removed all mentions of the site and revised several portraits to better reflect their subjects’ probable complexions, reports Riccardo Luna for Italian newspaper la Repubblica.
‘It is now clear to me [the sources] have distorted primary and secondary sources to push a pernicious white supremacist agenda,’ Voshart writes on Medium.”
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[From Artnet]
“For previous projects, Voshart has also used machine learning to make portraits of Egyptian mummies and to render a series of figurative clay sculptures created by students at the New York Academy of Art into realistic faces.
His creations are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the kind of work being done online. Indeed, there are entire threads dedicated to using tools like Artbreeder to bring long-gone figures back to life. A quick scroll of one such thread on Reddit yields impressive, uncanny, and sometimes just plain creepy pictures of figures brought to life including Cleopatra, the Venus de Milo, and even the Statue of Liberty.”