You have a favorite historical figure, such as St. Nicholas or King Tutankhamun, that you want to know what they looked like. It’s easy to go back and look at portraits of historical figures from the last couple of centuries, but taking a look further back than that is a little more challenging.
Thankfully, we now have digital face reconstruction technology that can give us a sense of their real faces from Cleopatra to Emily Dickinson. What is more interesting is that they look like real people! That does mean that some of your favorite historical figures might appear a little different than what you imagined – or even what their bust statues show, but the technology is spot on to what they would look like
41. They are showing what historical figures looked like.
If you have ever looked at a photo of yourself and gasped that you don’t look like that, then you may have a bit of an idea of the headache that scientists get when they look at artistic representations of historical figures. Many probably looked nothing like their pictures suggest.
Consider Mary, the mother of Jesus, who is the subject of countless Medieval paintings. Those paintings tell us pretty much nothing about what Mary looked like; instead, they tell us what people in particular cultures and periods believed about her. But imagine computers being able to generate a more accurate image of what she, and numerous other people in history, actually looked like.