Here’s How 20 Famous Historical And Fictional Figures ‘Really’ Looked Like

Bas Uterwijk is a Dutch photographer and digital artist who likes to show how famous historical and fictional figures ‘really’ looked like in his realistic digital portraits. The man started experimenting with the idea back in 2019 and has created numerous portraits since. Bas says that it all started with a photograph of infamous outlaw Billy the Kid and after seeing positive results, he continued by doing Napoleon.

In a recent interview with Bored Panda, the artist said that he thinks the human face hasn’t drastically changed over the years – only the hairstyles and makeup did. However, despite this fact, we’re constantly seeing people’s portraits distorted in ancient art forms.

Not that long ago, Bas had started experimenting with generative adversarial neural networks (mainly a program called Artbreeder) and believes that one day it could become the “successor to photography”.  “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,” explained the artist. Bas says that when using the program, he lets the AI do most of the work, however, sometimes he needs to cheat a little in Photoshop at it doesn’t do clothes or classical hairstyles yet.

“Although I see my creations more as artistic impressions than as scientifically justified, in some cases, the results for me feel much closer to reality than most other methods that are used in reconstructions of people so far,” explained the artist. You be the judge on whether Bas is right or not – check out his recreations of  famous historical and fictional figures in the gallery below!

More info: basuterwijk.com | Instagram | twitter.com

#1 Vincent Van Gogh

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#2 Statue Of Liberty

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#3 Fayum Mummy Portraits

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#4 Napoleon

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#5 Billy The Kid

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#6 Jesus Christ

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#7 David (Michelangelo)

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#8 Rembrandt

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#9 Frankenstein’s Monster

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#10 Sandro Botticelli

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#11 Niccolò Machiavelli

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#12 Doomguy

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#13 Jan Van Eyck

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#14 Fayum Mummy Portraits

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#15 George Washington

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#16 Fayum Mummy Portraits

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#17 Elizabeth I, Queen Of England

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#18 Fayum Mummy Portraits

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#19 Alfred E. Newman (Mad Magazine)

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#20 Sandro Botticelli

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