Daniel Voshart is neither a historian nor a sculptor. He is a virtual reality designer, and a few years ago he asked himself a simple question: what would Roman emperors really look like if they walked down the street today?
To answer it, he took around 800 classical busts of rulers such as Augustus, Caligula, Nero, Hadrian and Trajan, cross-referenced those features with ancient coins and descriptions of skin, eye and hair color written by authors of the time, and used machine learning to reconstruct their faces with Photoshop. Cold marble became skin, wrinkles, scars.
An archaeologist from the University of Copenhagen points out something interesting: Roman sculptures tended to idealize their emperors, so these versions are not 100% accurate either. But what they do achieve is humanizing them. Men who ruled half the world end up looking like your neighbor, your teacher, someone who rides the subway with you. Which of those faces left you thinking?
