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Artist Lets Us Get A Glimpse Of What These 28 Famous Historical And Popular Figures ‘Really’ Looked Like (New Pics)
Interview With ArtistWe all know what famous personalities of the modern day look like, but it's a whole different topic when it comes to history. Most of them were portrayed by artists who were influenced by the trends and technologies of their day, and their own unique style was a factor too. It's not rare that one single person looked completely differently depending on the artist. So naturally, we come to wonder what they really looked like. And the current technology powered by computers and artificial intelligence offers an answer to that interest. And sometimes the answer looks so real it's even creepy. It's as if these historical personalities are our own contemporaries.
The Netherlands artist Bas Uterwijk, known as Ganbrood on Instagram, satisfies our curiosity yet again by showing some new and updated versions of historical and fictional personalities.
More info: Instagram | basuterwijk.com | twitter.com
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Nefertiti
It isn't the first time that Bas' neural network reconstructions have been featured here on Bored Panda. His first post went viral, and the recreations in the second post were no less impressive than in the first one. We highly recommend checking them out, as even in today's post there are updated versions of the images that were in the older posts, and it's very interesting to see the evolution of how they were refined to what they are as of now.
Cleopatra
Another powerful woman who pissed off the lovers who couldn't control her
Aphrodite (New Version)
Bas has been kind enough to share with us about his life and his passion in two separate interviews: "Although my career path has swayed in different directions, my focus has always been on playing with realism and illusion. Special effects, 3D animation, and video games all try to make fantasies plausible. Influenced by European comics, movies, and video games, I have experimented with most forms of visual storytelling."
Akhenaten
David By Michelangelo (New Version)
"Working with classical art versus photography in neural networks for me feels like the next step in depicting ourselves. Just as photography changed the shape of classical painting, techniques based on artificial intelligence will start influencing and inspiring art and (post-)photography. AI applications are developing at an incredible speed and it will influence almost all segments of our society. I wouldn't be surprised if, in five or ten years, it will be possible to create moving, interactive three-dimensional characters with these techniques: super-realistic avatars that people are able to communicate within virtual surroundings."
Tutankhamun
I learned recently he was the product of incest so he had a lot of deformities
Elizabeth I (New Version)
"After working more than a decade in 3D animation, I was getting frustrated with the artificiality of it, so photography, for me, was a way to expand my horizons and investigation of what reality looks like: getting to know light and the way it behaves on materials, human faces, and how we perceive expressions in their smallest details."
Jesus Christ Based On Leonardo Da Vinci's "Savior Of The World"
At least it's not the Northern European Jesus that we're all used to see 🤪
As Da Vinci was born in 1452, 14 centuries too late for them to have met, his idea of Jesus is not likely to be any closer than ours another 5 centuries later!
To those who downvoted: I wrote intentionally "into MY heart". How can you say NO WAY to that? 😂 Ridiculous!
Load More Replies...He wouldn't have straight brown hair, he's from middle eastern area, this still isn't accurate, he still looks too white.
Christy...he was an Israeli Aramaic/Hebrew speaking semitic/jew. They usually, even today, have dark curly hair and a dark complexion closer to the Mediterranean peoples. On the shroud of Turin his hair is long, wavy and more than shoulder length.
Load More Replies...Dude should have a fro, tho. Or at the very least, very curly hair. It was described as having the likeness to wool.
Jesus would have had a much darker skin tone. DaVinci's depiction of Jesus was based on his lover. This isn't Jesus, this is the dude that was boning Leo
Since Jesus is supposed to have lived 1452 years before Michelangelo was born, this is another exercise in futility.
"Savior of the World" is based on Eastern Christianity icons of Jesus Christ, which trace their lineage back to the first century. In other words, there were people around to judge the accuracy of those paintings who had actually seen Jesus in the flesh. He was swarthy, large-nosed, cleft-chinned, long-faced and long-haired and for whatever reason, cleft-bearded. That WAS certainly a unique style for later-Roman-Empire Jews, but he was rocking the look of a small cult within Judaism, Essenes, who practiced asceticism, priestly celibacy, and voluntary poverty long BEFORE Jesus.
A. if I wanted to know how Leonardo thought the Big J might look why wouldn't I just look at Salvator Mundi? B. how sure are we that Leonardo actually painted Salvator Mundi?
Jesus was real and has been proven to be real and thats ALLL he was. And than they made all these stories about him with primitive thinking on how to explain simple things.
Load More Replies...Apollo
"These 'Deep Learning' networks are trained with thousands of photographs of human faces and are able to create near-photorealistic people from scratch or fit uploaded faces in a 'Latent Space' of a total of everything the model has learned. I think the human face hasn't changed dramatically over thousands of years and apart from hairstyles and makeup, people that lived long ago probably looked very much like us, but we are used to seeing them in the often distorted styles of ancient art forms that existed long before the invention of photography."
Fayum Mummy Portrait (New Version)
William Shakespeare's Juliet Capulet
But Bas isn't a one-trick pony: "Next to the historical recreations, I really love to work on completely made-up faces. For my audience, it sometimes is hard to see what they are looking at. Especially for people who are not familiar with the technical aspects of my work. That way, they don't know how much is made up. It could be a photograph of someone they have never seen before. I aim to make these faces interesting enough so they captivate and intrigue the viewer, like in any good classical portrait."
Mary Shelley
Lilith
Queen Tia
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mona Lisa
Idia
Fayum Mummy Portrait (New Version)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
He looks much older here than he ever got (he died at 37). Maybe Mozart the elder?
Judith Jans Leyster
Anne Lister
I love when they make them smiling :) For some reason it makes them feel more real
Sofonisba Anguissola
Doomguy (New Version)
Fayum Mummy Portrait (New Version)
Isabella Brant (New Version)
some of these are beginning to look repetitive, especially around the eyes
Farmer From Laren By Martinus Van Regteren Altena
Sandro Botticelli's Portrait Of A Young Man Holding A Roundel
Vincenzo Catena's Portrait Of A Young Man
This is just a list of tweaks made to fit modern standards of beauty: smooth skin, sharp chin, well-shaped lips, etc.
Many of the Egyptian ones are completely inaccurate. Ancient Egyptians were not sub-Saharan (black) africans. They were Mediterranean/European/Middle Eastern people. In other words, they looked white. Historians have always known this and it has now been scientifically confirmed with DNA. https://news.sky.com/story/egyptian-mummies-have-european-and-turkish-dna-scientists-10898867
Yes, but nowadays if you dare to say it you're finished.
Load More Replies...This is just the artists perception, so the title saying its "what they really looked like" is somewhat misleading
Wait, did they just remove the Paloma Picasso portrait because it proves that all of these portraits are horseshit? (Seeing as Paloma Picasso is still alive and the portrait they made of her looked nothing like her?)
This is ridiculous. Most of the portrait are about fictional or mythological characters. And the real historical ones are questionable at best.
This is just a list of tweaks made to fit modern standards of beauty: smooth skin, sharp chin, well-shaped lips, etc.
Many of the Egyptian ones are completely inaccurate. Ancient Egyptians were not sub-Saharan (black) africans. They were Mediterranean/European/Middle Eastern people. In other words, they looked white. Historians have always known this and it has now been scientifically confirmed with DNA. https://news.sky.com/story/egyptian-mummies-have-european-and-turkish-dna-scientists-10898867
Yes, but nowadays if you dare to say it you're finished.
Load More Replies...This is just the artists perception, so the title saying its "what they really looked like" is somewhat misleading
Wait, did they just remove the Paloma Picasso portrait because it proves that all of these portraits are horseshit? (Seeing as Paloma Picasso is still alive and the portrait they made of her looked nothing like her?)
This is ridiculous. Most of the portrait are about fictional or mythological characters. And the real historical ones are questionable at best.