Ironically, the pictures are wrong. Wrong hair colors and wrong eye colors. Not enough blondes and grey/blue eyes.
Caracalla is especially bad becuase we have a painting of him as a kid. Completely white.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracalla#/media/File:Portrait_of_family_of_Septimius_Severus_-_Altes_Museum_-_Berlin_-_Germany_2017.jpg
Right kid.
He's pasty from being a spoilt rich kid living inside but still has obviously dark colouring. If you ever have the misfortune to watch daytime Italian TV you see this look all the time in the presenters, it's still very fashionable there.
Let's be real here. He is as white as they come and the dad is tanned
It really shows how antiwhite our modern culture is when we see stuff like this.
Now this is a revisionist history I can get behind.
[deleted] 3 years ago ago
I think he looks Russian.
Let's try and keep BLM away from those status.
Voshart’s goal “was not to romanticize emperors or make them seem heroic,” he says on Medium. Instead, “my approach was to favor the bust that was made when the emperor was alive. Otherwise, I favored the bust made with the greatest craftsmanship and where the emperor was stereotypically uglier—my pet theory being that artists were likely trying to flatter their subjects.”
While I admire his reasoning for trying to subvert what in all likelihood is the fundamental desire of artists to keep getting paid, he does make perhaps one mistaken assumption. Namely in that Romans were notorious for their political propaganda, and it's wholly possible crafting ugly depictions of political rivals was also quite common. Just something to keep in mind.
Case in point is Nero, for in Nero's time the political propaganda was so immense that it ENTIRELY obscured history it was so contentious. We have whole libraries of propaganda surrounding Nero and basically nothing we can rely upon as fact, and then there's the later Catholic mythmaking about the Neronian fire and myth of Neronian persecution. I find it more likely than not the busts he chose to base Nero on were fictitious depictions that were made specifically to inspire disgust, not truth, given how much of the propaganda at the time of Nero's opponents did the same thing.
Nero was the original Neckbeard. He killed his mum and eventually killed himself. Loser!
[deleted] 3 years ago ago
You are welcome.
https://voshart.com/ROMAN-EMPEROR-PROJECT
What's neat is the family resemblance.
For example, the Flavians are related: Vespasian 69–79 AD, Titus 79–81 AD, Domitian 81–96 AD. According to Joseph Atwill, they were instrumental in the foundation of Christianity.
Relatives' portraits were included in the training set, so some resemblance is inevitable.
If you are into this kind of stuff, I highly recommend taking a look at Mikhail Gerasimov's facial reconstructions. They are superb.
Northern Italians often have blue eyes. So, unless it's been documented wht these dudes eye colors were, the renderings are a nice start, unnecessary but nice.
Gotta love all the Leftists crying about this. 'Muh white supremacism!"
superjesus |20 pointswritten 3 years ago ago
This is completely false. The Romans were all black. There were no white people before 1942 when Adolf Hitler was created by the devil, right before Christianity stopped being real. Everyone knows that. /s