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Artist Lets Us Get A Glimpse Of What These 20 Famous Historical And Popular Figures ‘Really’ Looked Like
Being born in the modern age, we often forget how different things were before us. People could only know what someone looked like based on an artist's subjective vision or a grainy black-and-white photo. Despite the efforts of the artists, paintings can rarely achieve the level of realism that pictures can. And thus, people often wonder how some of the most famous historical figures really looked with all of the subjectiveness removed from the image. Bas Uterwijk, a photographer from Amsterdam who has a background in computer graphics, 3D animation, and special effects, slowly but surely tries to provide the answer to this aching question.
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Statue Of Liberty
He started in 2019. After experimenting with Billy the Kid's photograph and seeing positive results, Uterwijk decided to try and recreate someone who lived in an era where there were no photographs. He tried Napoleon, but didn't want to share the results because they were "nice, but not perfect." About a few months ago, he came back to Napoleon and tried it once again. "The software I work with is developing fast," he thought, so he figured trying it at a later time might bring better results. You can see how his "current" Napoleon turned out in the picture below.
Vincent Van Gogh
Fayum Mummy Portraits
Here's what he told Bored Panda: "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."
David (Michelangelo)
Jesus Christ
This reconstruction looks far too European. Genetically he would have looked closer to a Sephardi Jew from the Middle East.
He started experimenting with creating images by using generative adversarial neural networks, because he thinks it will one day be the "successor to photography." "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."
Napoleon
Rembrandt
Billy The Kid
Artbreeder, Bas's program of choice, uses artificial intelligence and neural networks to create near-photorealistic images based on his input combined with what it knows about how faces look and how light behaves in photography. "I try to do everything as procedural as possible and let the AI do the most work, but sometimes I need to cheat a little in Photoshop because these GANs don't do clothes or classical hairstyles yet."
Frankenstein's Monster
Sandro Botticelli
Botticelli was a man. This is a portait by him not of him.
Load More Replies...Another case of a direct copy from an extant painting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_a_Young_Man_(Botticelli,_London)
Botticelli never wed, and expressed a strong aversion to the idea of marriage, a prospect he claimed gave him nightmares. The popular view is that he suffered from unrequited love for Simonetta Vespucci, a married noblewoman. According to legend, she had served as the model for The Birth of Venus and recurs throughout his paintings, despite the fact that she had died years earlier, in 1476. Botticelli asked that when he die he be buried at her feet in the Church of Ognissanti in Florence. His wish was carried out when he died some 34 years later, in 1510. Some modern historians have also examined other aspects of his sexuality. In 1938, Jacques Mesnil discovered a summary of a charge in the Florentine Archives for November 16, 1502 which read simply, "Botticelli keeps a boy"; under an accusation of [sodomy]. The painter would then have been fifty-eight; the charges were eventually dropped. Mesnil dismissed it as a customary slander by... partisans and adversaries...
Is it just me or does he resemble a young (late 90s/early 00s) Alex Borstein?
What's wrong with all with your stupid comments? So what is your problem, he is a teenagerin this photo! Some women look more like men and visa versa. OK? Grow up!
Load More Replies...Niccolò Machiavelli
"Although I see my creations more as artistic impressions than as scientifically justified, in some cases, the results for me feel much closer to reality than most other methods that are used in reconstructions of people so far," Bas expressed. They say that a portrait artist's main goal isn't getting the little details right, but capturing the "essence" of the person's character. Do you think Bas has managed to achieve that? Tell us in the comments!
Fayum Mummy Portraits
George Washington
Fayum Mummy Portraits
I love Fayum Mummy portraits. Very Romanesque - because they were. So much like the portraits found in Pompeii
Fayum Mummy Portraits
Doomguy
Elizabeth I, Queen Of England
It doesn’t look like the artist did anything different from the original painting
Jan Van Eyck
Sandro Botticelli
Alfred E. Newman (Mad Magazine)
I love how real faces aren't symmetrical, there's so much character in faces and in these portrayals.
This foolish designer deliberately drew the face of Christ ugly while Christ was handsome and majestic, white in complexion and with golden hair and heavenly eyes, as described by the governor of Judaism in a letter to Caesar of Rome.
I'm a Muslim from Malaysia, I don't know about the golden hair, but I agree with you on the white in complexion, majestic, and handsome Levantine man. Prophet Isa A.S (Jesus), Peace be Upon Him.
Load More Replies...I loved this!! Scientifically, Jesus wouldn't look like that, but taking he based his work in the "classical" image of him, it looks very similar!! Nice job!!
Love the idea of what they really look like, but Alfred E Newman looks like..... welll A.E.M.!!
These are amazing, and really quite believable. I liked Napoleon and George Washington. The mummy portraits were incredible, and looked very Arabic.
These were all incredibly well done and really fascinating. I love how the artists still kept some of elements from the original paintings (the Mad magazine kid was the stuff of nightmares though).
I love how real faces aren't symmetrical, there's so much character in faces and in these portrayals.
This foolish designer deliberately drew the face of Christ ugly while Christ was handsome and majestic, white in complexion and with golden hair and heavenly eyes, as described by the governor of Judaism in a letter to Caesar of Rome.
I'm a Muslim from Malaysia, I don't know about the golden hair, but I agree with you on the white in complexion, majestic, and handsome Levantine man. Prophet Isa A.S (Jesus), Peace be Upon Him.
Load More Replies...I loved this!! Scientifically, Jesus wouldn't look like that, but taking he based his work in the "classical" image of him, it looks very similar!! Nice job!!
Love the idea of what they really look like, but Alfred E Newman looks like..... welll A.E.M.!!
These are amazing, and really quite believable. I liked Napoleon and George Washington. The mummy portraits were incredible, and looked very Arabic.
These were all incredibly well done and really fascinating. I love how the artists still kept some of elements from the original paintings (the Mad magazine kid was the stuff of nightmares though).