Artist Uses Neural Networks To Generate Realistic Faces Of People From 7 Famous Paintings
Technology has developed a lot over the past 20 years; every day, people come up with something new. This digital artist decided to use a neural network to recreate the faces of people from famous paintings like the Mona Lisa and the Birth of Venus.
The artist is named Denis Shiryaev and it seems he has a fascination with recreating old photos and paintings and seeing how they would look now. Although not historically accurate, they’re still very fun to see!
Denis Shiryaev uses the facial expressions of other people from YouTube and TikTok and neural networks to make the recreations as realistic as he can. The Cambridge Dictionary describes a neural network as a computer system or a type of computer program that is designed to copy the way in which the human brain operates.
More info: youtube.com | neural.love | Instagram
Leonardo da Vinci – Mona Lisa (1503–1506)
Image credits: Denis Shiryaev
Mona Lisa is a portrait painted by the famous Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It was created in 1503 and has been kept in the Louvre Museum since 1797. This painting is famous all over the world and it would be very hard to find a person that knows nothing about it.
Frida Kahlo – Self-portrait (1940)
Image credits: Denis Shiryaev
Frida Kahlo was a famous painter from Mexico, known for her self-portraits. Her work was inspired by nature as well as the artifacts and traditions of Mexico. In her art, she explored questions of identity, gender, class, and race roles in Mexico.
Sandro Botticelli – The Birth of Venus (1485-1486)
Image credits: Denis Shiryaev
Painted by Italian artist Sandro Botticelli, the Birth of Venus is one of the most famous paintings in the world. Created somewhere between 1485–1486, it still remains one of the most beautiful pieces of art. The painting depicts the Roman goddess Venus emerging from the sea.
Leonardo da Vinci – Lady with an Ermine (1489-1490)
Image credits: Denis Shiryaev
It is said that The Lady with an Ermine is a portrait of a beautiful woman named Cecilia Gallerani, who was the favorite mistress of the married Duke Ludovico Sforza, the Duke who was da Vinci’s patron and champion for 18 years, and had the nickname of “the white ermine.”
Grant Wood – American Gothic (1930)
Image credits: Denis Shiryaev
American Gothic is a painting created by Grant Wood in 1930. The painting depicts simple farmers posing for a portrait. These farmers are actually just the sister and dentist of Grant Wood standing in front of a simple farmhouse.
Rembrandt van Rijn – The Night Watch (1642)
Image credits: Denis Shiryaev
The Night Watch is a 1642 painting by Rembrandt van Rijn showing the Militia Company of District II under the command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq.
Johannes Vermeer – Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665)
Image credits: Denis Shiryaev
Girl with a Pearl Earring is a painting created in 1665 by a Dutch painter named Johannes Vermeer.
Sadly, the iconic pearl earring is missing in Denis’ recreation.
What do you think of these recreations? Are they cool or creepy? Tell us in the comments and share what painting you would like to see recreated!
Here’s the video with the full process of how the paintings were recreated
Image credits: Denis Shiryaev
1.3Mviews
Share on FacebookThe paintings look far more realistic than those ridiculous renderings
in some cases i agree, although i think mona lisa doesn't look anything like a real human and often classic paintings have strange looks to faces, females especially. there were only a few that i thought didn't look more realistic than the painting, or where the painting seemed realistic to start with (compared to the rendering at least).
Load More Replies...And here is her undated photo, unibrow and all. 85BFE465-B...5-jpeg.jpg
Load More Replies...Don't listen to the idiot whose user is Subversive Citizen, he/ she is that person no one likes and thinks they talk smart but it is just noise.
Load More Replies...What's interesting is that the artist uses YouTube and TikTok vids as a reference. So the 'lens' through which we're looking is from our current day stream of content creators (for the sake of this argument, influencer is actually a more accurate term). That's why Frida doesn't have a unibrow. According to the neural network, it doesn't exist. That's why they all look like filtered hipsters :)
I was actually impressed with the Mona Lisa one! ...Then I saw the rest. -___-
And even Mona Lisa is like "give her bigger eyes" and "poor thing does not have naturally lush eyelashes and eyebrows, so we will paint those on" plus "pale lips? Eww"
Load More Replies...Jesus these are bad! The original paintings are a lot more realistic than these. The girl with the pearl earing looks like an anime.
These "realistic" faces only make sense if you think 21st century makeup is realistic. "Lady With an Ermine" is terrible! The original clearly is not wearing any makeup. And her lips are thinner, too - can't have that! And "The Night Watch" is ridiculous - the guy in the generated picture doesn't remotely look like the guy in the painting. "Girl With a Pearl Earring" - ugh. That one didn't even work. What happened to her scarf? And the earring??
Heck she probably was wearing make up from her time. Her eyebrows are super thin. It's just that standards of beauty have changed, so apparently the artist decided that, even if it wasn't realistic, she just had to have lip gloss, eyeliner, and mascara.
Load More Replies...These are just awful no artistic merit. What it does show is the fakeness of modern make up covering up natural beauty. Why would you remove Fridas mono Brow that’s part of what definined her
The original paintings have character and mood. The renderings look like those silly twits who use too many filters.
Yeah, not really seeing it. Most of these don't really look like the people in the paintings, but rather like influencers who have manipulated their own pictures.
What about modernizing these classic paintings turned the forehead of the girl with a pearl earring blue??? She was wearing a scarf on her head. She was never turning into a Smurf.
If you intend no offense, please say it without being offensive. Just saying!!
Load More Replies...The AI is based on human intelligence, which is right there a big problem... and may explain why Mona Lisa looks like she never saw daylight. WTH?
Not one of them looks like the original subject. What is the point of this? Modern photo+photoshop+famous painting=whatever this is. Why?
They look like overlapped random portraits on the paintings.
Why do people think the paintings don't represent the ACTUAL individuals who sat for them? I'm pretty sure they looked more like the paintings, than these recreations. And, as another person already said, we know what Frida Kahlo actually looked like. What was the point?
At least now we know that we've got nothing to fear from A.I. The most striking is the Night Watch where the man in the painting is clearly looking at someone and the A.I. render is some stoned guy looking mindlessly into a void..
1) There are extant photos of Frida Kahlo!! 2) Yermeer is spinning in his grave over that WRETCHED rendering. 3) Shave 20 pounds off da Vinci's Masterpiece, eh? Nope 4) Turned Venus on a Half Shell into an Instaspammer! Much fail.
The AI is not ready for showcase. Noses are all the same and far from the original, not to mention there's a bias towards coloring the eyes blue (it did that to Frida's and Mona Lisa's brown eyes) or pitch black. In American Gothic and Girl with a Pearl Earring is reversed, the original light blue eyes are black in the AI version. For Boticelli's Venus the AI is 100% off.
Venus is clearly a redhead in the painting. So why a brunette in the photo?!
I'm sorry, but the original works are much more beautiful and realistic. Why mess with something great?
I think a little too much creative license was taken with some of these.
Sorry Mike, I must object to the word 'creative' in relation to this mess.
Load More Replies...Since every other comment is negative, here's a positive one: Love the use of technology to compare old paintings to an opinion of moderness
I think these are great. P.S. Pay no attention to the mean comments. Some people are trapped in negative energy and can't escape.
This is only changing faces to a 21st century standard of beauty. Which is ridiculous.
Dear Lord. He took everything beautiful about these paintings and turned them into Euro-centric countoured faces that eschew diversity. The Girl With the Pearl Earring doesn't even HAVE a pearl earring.
I agree they're terrible, but with the exception of Kahlo, I see nothing other than European subjects...
Load More Replies...the 7th photo (Girl with the pearl earring) didn't work, it has Ariana Grande's face
None of these are even vaguely close. And what's with Frida's eyebrows in the 'real' pic?
Seems pointless. Intro even says that end result is "not historically accurate"...it's just a gallery of digitally altered (but not improved) art.
The American Gothic women looked less real after than before. But it’s all still cool.
It appears whatever algorithms and images they used to create the so-called realistic images were heavily bent towards choosing the most attractive features possible. It became so apparent that after the first five or six images, I just quickly breezed through the rest to have my suspicions confirmed. There is no way many of the images whose models obviously had less than attractive features could be reinterpreted as the kind of faces ordinary people find themselves glued to celebrity news day in and a day out for.
Disappointing. The first one (Mona Lisa) looked good, but the rest are worthless. Hopefully the technique will improve, as it has potential; but right now, I'm not impressed.
I think these all look rlly cool but American Gothic did the exact opposite then it said it would
Hmm.. who did this? Most of these suck. I think they could be a lot better if someone knew what they were doing with the software.
I've got to quit reading comments. Too many people can't enjoy anything because they have to find something wrong. So sad.
I can tell by the comments that most people didn't actually bother to watch the video. The point of this was NOT the photographs. The creator even said that they are not considered accurate. The point was to turn the portraits into "living" people by using tiktok and youtube videos to collect facial expressions and animate the portraits.
Those look terrible and clearly don't have the same features as the paintings. This isn't a "realistic" rendering of paintings, this is a rendering of "what subjects of paintings look like if they conformed to conventional modern standards of beauty." They gave the Mona Lisa fuller lips, less protruding eyes to make her features more feminine. Also darker eyes. Her eyes in the painting are clearly honey colored or light brown, not dark brown. With Frida Kahlo it's even more obvious. They took away the facial hair and unibrow, and gave her a stronger jaw and chin. Also changed the eye color from clearly brown to dark blue/grey. The facial shape on Venus is actually close, but the shape of the lips is wrong and they gave her darker hair and eyes for whatever reason. Lady with Ermine - softer features overall, fuller lips, and apparently they decided to fix the fact that the poor thing wasn't born into a society that had lash extensions!
cont... American Gothic - Don't even know where to start! All of the man's features are different than the painting, and the woman doesn't even look like a human. Night Watch - Completely different facial hair more in line with what's fashionable in facial hair now than at the time of the painting, different shaped nose, larger eyes and less eye bags. Overall looks like a younger and more attractive, by modern standards, man. Girl with pearl earring - Larger, darker eyes, plumper lips, nasal bridge less sharp, thinner jaw line, less underbite, modern makeup (longer lashes, eyeliner, different color lips), and no pearl earring because that makes sense. I mean they might has well have just called this "what if Kylie Jenner went as a Vermeer for Halloween?"
Load More Replies...That's the worst thing I've seen on here. None of them looked anything like the paintings. LOL
Why did you give Mona Lisa eyebrows? In the painting she doesn't have them.
But they are relatively impressive, doubt I could do that.
Load More Replies...Why would you recreate girl with a pearl earring and miss out the earring?!
The renderings look like they're taken from current trends. The girl with the earring for instance had voluptuous lips and highly arched eyebrows, a far cry from the painting. I think how Venus looked natural though.
there is one thing that is so clear in the paintings, the eye colours. why did he change the eye colours? frida clearly had brown eyes. is blue eyes the ideal of beauty of this "artist"? also, the paintings certainly look more real than the recreated ones.
We all know the true American Gothic rendering https://images.app.goo.gl/954qcyhFUMT68TY38
Hmm, some of these painting look like people I know, it have seen. Most of these renderings don't look like anyone I've ever met.
It could have more or less just put Scarlett Johansson in as the Girl with a Pearl Earring because she pretty much inhabited her in the movie.
We could have just put Scarlett Johannson in for the Girl with a Pearl earring because she pretty much nails it.
I don't understand all the negative comments. I thought this was really interesting. The rendering of Frida Kahlo reminds me of some actor, but for the life of me I can't think of who? (And seeing as how we have actual photos of her, I thought it was a poor choice, but whatever). I didn't like the "Venus" so much, mainly because the hair color was so off. But, all in all, I enjoyed it.
uh, I think you may be referring to that one children of sherlock Holme's book. Don't you ever disrespect Mono Lisa like that ever again.
Load More Replies...The paintings look far more realistic than those ridiculous renderings
in some cases i agree, although i think mona lisa doesn't look anything like a real human and often classic paintings have strange looks to faces, females especially. there were only a few that i thought didn't look more realistic than the painting, or where the painting seemed realistic to start with (compared to the rendering at least).
Load More Replies...And here is her undated photo, unibrow and all. 85BFE465-B...5-jpeg.jpg
Load More Replies...Don't listen to the idiot whose user is Subversive Citizen, he/ she is that person no one likes and thinks they talk smart but it is just noise.
Load More Replies...What's interesting is that the artist uses YouTube and TikTok vids as a reference. So the 'lens' through which we're looking is from our current day stream of content creators (for the sake of this argument, influencer is actually a more accurate term). That's why Frida doesn't have a unibrow. According to the neural network, it doesn't exist. That's why they all look like filtered hipsters :)
I was actually impressed with the Mona Lisa one! ...Then I saw the rest. -___-
And even Mona Lisa is like "give her bigger eyes" and "poor thing does not have naturally lush eyelashes and eyebrows, so we will paint those on" plus "pale lips? Eww"
Load More Replies...Jesus these are bad! The original paintings are a lot more realistic than these. The girl with the pearl earing looks like an anime.
These "realistic" faces only make sense if you think 21st century makeup is realistic. "Lady With an Ermine" is terrible! The original clearly is not wearing any makeup. And her lips are thinner, too - can't have that! And "The Night Watch" is ridiculous - the guy in the generated picture doesn't remotely look like the guy in the painting. "Girl With a Pearl Earring" - ugh. That one didn't even work. What happened to her scarf? And the earring??
Heck she probably was wearing make up from her time. Her eyebrows are super thin. It's just that standards of beauty have changed, so apparently the artist decided that, even if it wasn't realistic, she just had to have lip gloss, eyeliner, and mascara.
Load More Replies...These are just awful no artistic merit. What it does show is the fakeness of modern make up covering up natural beauty. Why would you remove Fridas mono Brow that’s part of what definined her
The original paintings have character and mood. The renderings look like those silly twits who use too many filters.
Yeah, not really seeing it. Most of these don't really look like the people in the paintings, but rather like influencers who have manipulated their own pictures.
What about modernizing these classic paintings turned the forehead of the girl with a pearl earring blue??? She was wearing a scarf on her head. She was never turning into a Smurf.
If you intend no offense, please say it without being offensive. Just saying!!
Load More Replies...The AI is based on human intelligence, which is right there a big problem... and may explain why Mona Lisa looks like she never saw daylight. WTH?
Not one of them looks like the original subject. What is the point of this? Modern photo+photoshop+famous painting=whatever this is. Why?
They look like overlapped random portraits on the paintings.
Why do people think the paintings don't represent the ACTUAL individuals who sat for them? I'm pretty sure they looked more like the paintings, than these recreations. And, as another person already said, we know what Frida Kahlo actually looked like. What was the point?
At least now we know that we've got nothing to fear from A.I. The most striking is the Night Watch where the man in the painting is clearly looking at someone and the A.I. render is some stoned guy looking mindlessly into a void..
1) There are extant photos of Frida Kahlo!! 2) Yermeer is spinning in his grave over that WRETCHED rendering. 3) Shave 20 pounds off da Vinci's Masterpiece, eh? Nope 4) Turned Venus on a Half Shell into an Instaspammer! Much fail.
The AI is not ready for showcase. Noses are all the same and far from the original, not to mention there's a bias towards coloring the eyes blue (it did that to Frida's and Mona Lisa's brown eyes) or pitch black. In American Gothic and Girl with a Pearl Earring is reversed, the original light blue eyes are black in the AI version. For Boticelli's Venus the AI is 100% off.
Venus is clearly a redhead in the painting. So why a brunette in the photo?!
I'm sorry, but the original works are much more beautiful and realistic. Why mess with something great?
I think a little too much creative license was taken with some of these.
Sorry Mike, I must object to the word 'creative' in relation to this mess.
Load More Replies...Since every other comment is negative, here's a positive one: Love the use of technology to compare old paintings to an opinion of moderness
I think these are great. P.S. Pay no attention to the mean comments. Some people are trapped in negative energy and can't escape.
This is only changing faces to a 21st century standard of beauty. Which is ridiculous.
Dear Lord. He took everything beautiful about these paintings and turned them into Euro-centric countoured faces that eschew diversity. The Girl With the Pearl Earring doesn't even HAVE a pearl earring.
I agree they're terrible, but with the exception of Kahlo, I see nothing other than European subjects...
Load More Replies...the 7th photo (Girl with the pearl earring) didn't work, it has Ariana Grande's face
None of these are even vaguely close. And what's with Frida's eyebrows in the 'real' pic?
Seems pointless. Intro even says that end result is "not historically accurate"...it's just a gallery of digitally altered (but not improved) art.
The American Gothic women looked less real after than before. But it’s all still cool.
It appears whatever algorithms and images they used to create the so-called realistic images were heavily bent towards choosing the most attractive features possible. It became so apparent that after the first five or six images, I just quickly breezed through the rest to have my suspicions confirmed. There is no way many of the images whose models obviously had less than attractive features could be reinterpreted as the kind of faces ordinary people find themselves glued to celebrity news day in and a day out for.
Disappointing. The first one (Mona Lisa) looked good, but the rest are worthless. Hopefully the technique will improve, as it has potential; but right now, I'm not impressed.
I think these all look rlly cool but American Gothic did the exact opposite then it said it would
Hmm.. who did this? Most of these suck. I think they could be a lot better if someone knew what they were doing with the software.
I've got to quit reading comments. Too many people can't enjoy anything because they have to find something wrong. So sad.
I can tell by the comments that most people didn't actually bother to watch the video. The point of this was NOT the photographs. The creator even said that they are not considered accurate. The point was to turn the portraits into "living" people by using tiktok and youtube videos to collect facial expressions and animate the portraits.
Those look terrible and clearly don't have the same features as the paintings. This isn't a "realistic" rendering of paintings, this is a rendering of "what subjects of paintings look like if they conformed to conventional modern standards of beauty." They gave the Mona Lisa fuller lips, less protruding eyes to make her features more feminine. Also darker eyes. Her eyes in the painting are clearly honey colored or light brown, not dark brown. With Frida Kahlo it's even more obvious. They took away the facial hair and unibrow, and gave her a stronger jaw and chin. Also changed the eye color from clearly brown to dark blue/grey. The facial shape on Venus is actually close, but the shape of the lips is wrong and they gave her darker hair and eyes for whatever reason. Lady with Ermine - softer features overall, fuller lips, and apparently they decided to fix the fact that the poor thing wasn't born into a society that had lash extensions!
cont... American Gothic - Don't even know where to start! All of the man's features are different than the painting, and the woman doesn't even look like a human. Night Watch - Completely different facial hair more in line with what's fashionable in facial hair now than at the time of the painting, different shaped nose, larger eyes and less eye bags. Overall looks like a younger and more attractive, by modern standards, man. Girl with pearl earring - Larger, darker eyes, plumper lips, nasal bridge less sharp, thinner jaw line, less underbite, modern makeup (longer lashes, eyeliner, different color lips), and no pearl earring because that makes sense. I mean they might has well have just called this "what if Kylie Jenner went as a Vermeer for Halloween?"
Load More Replies...That's the worst thing I've seen on here. None of them looked anything like the paintings. LOL
Why did you give Mona Lisa eyebrows? In the painting she doesn't have them.
But they are relatively impressive, doubt I could do that.
Load More Replies...Why would you recreate girl with a pearl earring and miss out the earring?!
The renderings look like they're taken from current trends. The girl with the earring for instance had voluptuous lips and highly arched eyebrows, a far cry from the painting. I think how Venus looked natural though.
there is one thing that is so clear in the paintings, the eye colours. why did he change the eye colours? frida clearly had brown eyes. is blue eyes the ideal of beauty of this "artist"? also, the paintings certainly look more real than the recreated ones.
We all know the true American Gothic rendering https://images.app.goo.gl/954qcyhFUMT68TY38
Hmm, some of these painting look like people I know, it have seen. Most of these renderings don't look like anyone I've ever met.
It could have more or less just put Scarlett Johansson in as the Girl with a Pearl Earring because she pretty much inhabited her in the movie.
We could have just put Scarlett Johannson in for the Girl with a Pearl earring because she pretty much nails it.
I don't understand all the negative comments. I thought this was really interesting. The rendering of Frida Kahlo reminds me of some actor, but for the life of me I can't think of who? (And seeing as how we have actual photos of her, I thought it was a poor choice, but whatever). I didn't like the "Venus" so much, mainly because the hair color was so off. But, all in all, I enjoyed it.
uh, I think you may be referring to that one children of sherlock Holme's book. Don't you ever disrespect Mono Lisa like that ever again.
Load More Replies...
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