Started as a personal project during the covid-19 lockdown, this series interprets how the 54 Roman emperors of the Principate (27 BC–285 AD) may have appeared. I created the portraits with Artbreeder and Photoshop, drawing on nearly 1,000 reference images of busts, coins, and other historical sources.
Artbreeder is based on StyleGAN2, which uses a Creative Commons image dataset in the training process.
These portraits are a non-scientific interpretation based on available artifacts. The project is continually updated to reflect new evidence or research, with all changes documented in a series of posts on Medium.
Upon its release, the series went viral and was featured in numerous international publications, including The Smithsonian Magazine, The Verge, and The Times of London.