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..
Readit News
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.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelian
> "The ancient sources do not agree on his place of birth, although he was generally accepted as being a native of Illyricum"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illyricum_(Roman_province)
And that is Spain before the Moorish invasion. A similar asterisk could be added to much of the rest of North Africa regarding Muslim conquest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_conquests
Now I wonder if this has to do with the learning set or that those face types are very common.
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.
Deleted Comment