In history, especially before the invention of photography, paintings have been invaluable for documenting what historical personalities looked like. Nowadays, however, the art of portrait has little use as a document, even though the artistic value hasn't changed. Paintings have an inseparable quality to them, which they can rarely ever transcend—a painting almost always looks like one. Nevertheless, with the advent of AI-generated images, paintings are still the primary source and material for drawing inspiration for recreation.
Nathan Shipley puts the paintings of famous historical personalities to good use. He uses them together with AI to recreate an incredibly realistic image, making something which was impossible even to imagine a few decades ago; namely, the possibility of seeing