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Will the real Julius Caesar please stand up?
Scholars struggle to determine what this most famous Roman actually looked like.
To make this portrait, artist David Samuel Stern photographed a bust of Caesar, circa 1512, at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Three photos were converted to red, green, and blue tonal ranges, printed on translucent vellum, cut into strips, woven by hand, and then backlit to create this final image. “Our collective mental picture of Caesar is almost certainly not what he really looked like,” Stern says.
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