Quite a bit "dark-washed". Aurelius was likely from the Balkans/Dacia, maybe even descended from Roman settlers, Carus was probably from southern Gaul.
Actually what irks me is his son Commodus: This is not how blonde people, even with a tan, even black haired Italians with a tan and narcistically coloring their hair with gold glitter, look like.
This is awesome. While listening to The History of Rome podcast, I went to Wikipedia to see whatever type of media there’s to see how the people looked like. For the old times, it’s of course statues, and sometimes only coins. For the late emperors there are paintings too, but fairly unrealistic.
I do always wonder what the basis of such machine learning rendering is. There's various traits that we, in modern times, associate with good-looking, successful people, and those traits often come back in face databases because those are commonly based on celebrities.
I can imagine that celebrities in Roman times would look quite different and therefore would produce completely different renders for the same pictures and statues.
Not a coincidence, this article doesn't seem to mention it, but in the Times (London) write-up it states the training data was similar-looking celebrities, and names Craig for Augustus.
My physical education teacher in High School was the spitting image of Trajan (this was late 90s). We were blown away the first time we saw a picture of Trajan in our texts. He used to call his Cadillac a "battlewagon" but after we showed him the picture he called it a "chariot" instead. Fun memories..
That is essentially the game the author played, and then used those faces as the training data for the render - this article doesn't seem to mention it though. You're right with Craig.
There's a conspicuous number of young dudes who were emperor for a few years or less and stopped being emperor because they died. It seems that emperorhood is bad for one's health.
Also, many of them were killed by praetorian guards. Obvious fix: disband the praetorians. Oh wait, actually we need those to protect against assassins!
OK, I have a question that has been bugging me for years. How do these Romans shave? Finely stropped bronze blades that must dull immediately? Did they pluck their whiskers?
Seems metal razor were invented at least 2000 years prior the Roman Empire. "Around 3000 BC when copper tools were developed, copper razors were invented. The idea of an aesthetic approach to personal hygiene may have begun at this time, though Egyptian priests may have practiced something similar to this earlier. Alexander the Great strongly promoted shaving during his reign in the 4th century BC because he believed it looked tidier." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaving#History
Well, they are using the descriptions that have come down to us from Ancient times, and I don't know how much the Ancient Romans differ from modern Romans in terms of their racial aspects. Italy has had a lot going on since ancient times in terms of peoples that have migrated there.
They almost all look the same (or at least have the same weird smirk). Is that an artifact of the methodology or is is a problem with the training set because all roman sculptors were trained by the same school?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carus
Vespasian and Domitian were Italian nobles. Tacitus (who was Italian too) and Florianus were half-brothers, so they should be similar.
Marcus Aurelius family comes from Spain, and his mother was a noble Roman woman... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domitia_Calvilla ...and his father's mother was a Roman woman too.
It is all just speculation but compare it to this artistic rendition:
https://i.redd.it/92np45xeap521.jpg
Actually what irks me is his son Commodus: This is not how blonde people, even with a tan, even black haired Italians with a tan and narcistically coloring their hair with gold glitter, look like.