What Historical Figures Actually Looked Like

We all know that black and white photographs of historical figures don’t actually do justice to what these people looked like back in the day. But Bas Uterwijk, who is a brilliant freelance photographer living in Amsterdam, decided to fix this.

Using digital software and a lot of patience, Uterwijk was able to restore the color to many historical figures and bring them back to life, with incredible results…

Vincent Van Gogh

Uncanny isn’t it? Thanks to Bas Uterwijk’s colorization, this photo of Vincent Van Gogh now looks like it was taken by a modern-day camera. Van Gogh was a Dutch painter who created about 2,100 artworks.

But perhaps he’s most famous for reportedly cutting off his ear so he could get a better visual of it while painting it.

Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military leader and artillery commander during the French Revolution. He passed in 1821, centuries before Uterwijk was born. While there are colored paintings of Napoleon, they didn’t achieve the level of realism that an actual photo could.

Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter whose work represented the linear grace of early Renaissance paintings. With the help of Artbreeder, a program that uses artificial intelligence and neural networks, Uterwijk was able to recreate Botticelli’s face.

The program creates near-photorealistic images based on his inputs and what the program knows about faces and the way light behaves in photos. Pretty handsome, right?

Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat and philosopher. In fact, some have called him the father of modern political science. Uterwijk thinks the process of generative adversarial neural networks used to create this photo will succeed today’s photographic techniques.

“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,” he told Bored Panda.