Realistic Portrait Research Articles

A caricaturistic portrait of Ovid from Brigetio (Komárom/Szőny, Hungary)

AbstractIn 2015 a preventive excavation was carried out preceding the laying of an optical cable in close vicinity to the legionary fortress of Brigetio. An otherwise regular Roman terracotta roof tile was found during the excavation, with the image of a bearded man and the inscribed name of Ovidius Naso. The depiction of the poet leans more towards caricature rather than a realistic portrait, but since we do not know of any ancient representations of Ovid, it is of great importance and fits well into the series of other graffiti on roof tiles from Pannonia.

Identity‐consistent transfer learning of portraits for digital apparel sample display

AbstractThe rapid development of the online apparel shopping industry demands innovative solutions for high‐quality digital apparel sample displays with virtual avatars. However, developing such displays is prohibitively expensive and prone to the well‐known “uncanny valley” effect, where a nearly human‐looking artifact arouses eeriness and repulsiveness, thus affecting the user experience. To effectively mitigate the “uncanny valley” effect and improve the overall authenticity of digital apparel sample displays, we present a novel photo‐realistic portrait generation framework. Our key idea is to employ transfer learning to learn an identity‐consistent mapping from the latent space of rendered portraits to that of real portraits. During the inference stage, the input portrait of an avatar can be directly transferred to a realistic portrait by changing its appearance style while maintaining the facial identity. To this end, we collect a new dataset, Daz‐Rendered‐Faces‐HQ (DRFHQ), specifically designed for rendering‐style portraits. We leverage this dataset to fine‐tune the StyleGAN2‐FFHQ generator, using our carefully crafted framework, which helps to preserve the geometric and color features relevant to facial identity. We evaluate our framework using portraits with diverse gender, age, and race variations. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations, along with ablation studies, highlight our method's advantages over state‐of‐the‐art approaches.

DiffTransfer: A Person Portrait Style Transfer Method Based on Stable Diffusion

With the widespread adoption of high-performance GPUs, NPUs, and other devices in recent years, the threshold for deploying large models on the edge has gradually lowered. Meanwhile, as social networks continue to thrive and virtual reality technology advances rapidly, there is an urgent demand for individuals to possess a realistic virtual identity to meet the ever-evolving social needs. In this context, portrait style transfer has attracted growing research interest. Different from the previous works that mainly follow the pipeline of generative adversarial network or variational autoencoder, this research proposes a method for person portrait style transfer based on the stable diffusion model. By pre-training underlying models, users only need to upload a small number of photos to generate corresponding LORA models for individuals. The approach involves style fusion using textual prompts and other models to modify portrait styles and generate images of individuals in different poses. Extensive visualization results validate the effectiveness of this work, which is able to generate realistic portrait images of people with different styles.

Još jednom o datiranju poliptiha Vittorea Carpaccia iz zadarske katedrale: tragom dokumenta iz 1497. godine

The polyptych for the altar of St Martin in the Zadar Cathedral, commissioned from Vittore Carpaccio by Canon Martin Mladošić, is one of those works from the painter’s oeuvre whose chronology is still not agreed upon. Various authors dated the Zadar polyptych to almost the entire range of the painter’s activities, from those who considered it a youthful work to those who considered it a late work, created at the very end of his career. The document that was recently found in the Zadar archive sheds a completely new light on the issue of dating the polyptych, excluding all dating in the early years of Carpaccioʼs work, but at the same time exposes the conditions and circumstances of its commission and creation. Namely, on September 12, 1497, in Zadar, Martin Mladošić appointed two representatives, who were supposed to demand from the painter Victor Scarpation (Vittore Carpaccio) in Venice to complete the work on the altarpiece for the altar of St Martin in the cathedral of St Anastasia in Zadar, in accordance with the contract he had previously concluded with the client. It was stated that, if the painter failed to do this, they should take from him the frame carved in Zadar and order the painting from other masters at his expense. However, if he completed and submitted the work, they should cancel the previously concluded contract. Considering Carpaccioʼs signature on the painting, it is obvious that the latter was ultimately achieved. And in the light of the fact that the client and the painter met in person, it can be assumed that the depiction of the donor in the painting is indeed a realistic portrait of a prominent Zadar canon. In combination with the previously known information from Mladošićʼs will, dated April 21, 1496, which referred to the making of the frame, it can be established that the polyptych was commissioned in 1496, and that the painting lasted until the end of 1497 or the beginning of 1498. Dated in this way, the Zadar polyptych can be precisely placed in the time between the two great Carpaccioʼs cycles, that is, after the completion of the Cycle of St Ursula and before starting work on the cycle at the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. The life of Martin Mladošić, in addition to his own notarial books, is witnessed by numerous archival documents, from which it is possible to partially reconstruct his biography, especially his career progression and position within Zadarʼs ecclesiastical circles, where he stood out as one of the most important and influential members of the cathedral chapter. Despite certain disagreements between the chapter and the archbishop, he remained the closest associate and confidant of Archbishop Maffeo Vallaresso. After Vallaressoʼs death, during the vacant episcopal seat, he seems to have been the head of the Zadar church hierarchy, and he retained a key role during the episcopate of Giovanni Robobello. The rise of his ecclesiastical career was accompanied by material prosperity, a luxurious house in the city, and extensive land holdings. So, investing in his own altar in the cathedral was a logical reflection of Mladošićʼs well-being and position. Also, we can assume that Mladošić, satisfied with Carpaccioʼs work, and still connected with the Vallaresso family, played a certain role in his engagement for the work in Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni.

Soviet Portrait Painting in China in the 1950s–1960s

Realistic portraiture occupies a special place in the history of Russian art. It had a huge impact on the fi ne arts of China, especially in the Soviet period, since realism and objectivity of the real world were closely intertwined in it, aesthetic perception was presented through artistic images and focused on reality and people. These artistic ideas and techniques suited the interests of the Chinese audience, allowing them to pay even more attention to the charm of modern life. This paper gives an interpretation of the study of Soviet realistic portraiture in China’s art history of the 1950–1960s, both from the side of history and from the side of research methods, and examines the serious infl uence and role of the realistic portrait of the Soviet period on Chinese painting.

OPTIMIZATION OF VR APPLICATION IN TEXTURING CULTURAL HERITAGE

Abstract. The research question underlying this short essay refers to the possibility of realizing through a well-established workflow a high level of immersivity in the VR representation of Cultural Heritage to be used as a working tool by architects and renovators as well as heritage scholars. At present active or passive 3D scanning techniques are a known reality where the choice of data acquisition system depends both on the final purpose and characteristics of the object to be surveyed. With the maturity achieved in point cloud acquisition, post processing phases and the development of BIM-based systems, the model has given the possibility to become a repository of information related to the existing, to be used for maintenance or renovation processes. If the model can represent the existing with a certain level of detail, it can be assumed that a differentiated Level of Immersivity can be organized depending on the specific needs it intends to fulfil. In the context of renovation or preservation of Cultural Heritage, the potential offered by VR becomes more interesting when it can provide a realistic portrait not only of the geometry, but also of the materiality and state of preservation of the buildings. This research opens new possibilities to develop tools to aid designers and renovators in degradation analysis, intervention projects, and scheduled maintenance. The research question starts analyzing the possibility of creating photorealistic immersive environments that are easy to access, organized based on surveys of existing heritage buildings using specific datasets.

Can a Slave Serve Two Masters? Jointly Owned Slaves in Documentary Papyri and the Synoptic Gospels

AbstractThis article examines the synoptic saying on serving two masters (Matt 6.24; Luke 16.13) in light of the evidence for jointly owned slaves in documentary papyri. The saying implies that the slave of two masters will inevitably be more loyal or exclusively loyal to one master. Scholars usually accept this as an accurate depiction of jointly owned slaves. However, the papyrological evidence shows that the relationship between jointly owned slaves and their owners varied in everyday life and that slaves had little control over their loyalty to each master. The saying is, therefore, not a fully realistic portrait of how jointly owned slaves served their masters in antiquity but is possibly a slave stereotype that contributes to the (un)faithful slave imageries in the Gospels.

Circle in the Square Theatre: A Comprehensive History

Circle in the Square Theatre: A Comprehensive History

Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet: Rebuilding the Bildungsroman

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet – an almost continuous rave of interconnected love and desire, anger and violence – is also a story of the protagonist’s struggle to make sense of her life by writing it. She turns a traditional genre of a young person’s coming of age into a neurologically realistic portrait of the growth of an artist by multiplying narrative voices and by ignoring conventional bounds of narrative probability. Her story of the growth of a creative mind adumbrates well the picture of brains and their processes currently being described and developed as a “predictive processing” model. Work in neurobiology and neurophysiology has been producing empirical demonstrations of the centrality of failure to successful human cognition.

Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the American Midwest

Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the American Midwest

The Making and Unmaking of Nationalist Literature from the National Margin

Abstract This article reconsiders the established modern Chinese writer Duanmu Hongliang and his first and most influential work, The Korchin Banner Plains (completed in 1933 and published in 1939), from a borderland perspective. The novel is set in western Manchuria, a multiethnic area of northeastern China that borders Inner Mongolia and was occupied by Japan in the early 1930s. The novel has been read by many as a realistic portrait of the natural and social landscape of the grassland and as an autobiographical account of the author's family history. This article disagrees, and treats the novel as a performative form of “territory-making” that purposefully recreates a Han-centered modern nation from its geographical margin by carefully reorganizing a web of intricate and competing multiethnic and multinational relations in the grassland. In particular, as a self-identified Manchu, Duanmu makes unconventional choices of both themes and literary styles to imply a calculated embrace of a modern nation by an ethnic other. Through a close examination of the spatial-textual negotiations in the novel, the article delineates how a classic work of nationalist literature was produced from the borderland and how this work exposes the precariousness and contradictions inherent in the grand narrative of modern nationhood.

Ideology and Subversion: A Comparative Study of Mrinal Sen’s Padatik and Raghav Bandopadhyay’s Communis

Padatik, the final part of Mrinal Sen’s movies of the Calcutta Trilogy, offers both a historical document on the political mindset of the burgeoning Bengali youth and a personal struggle of Sen himself making sense of the Marxist revolutionary ideology and ascertaining whether or not it is a misguided enterprise. Raghav Bandyopadhyay in his conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty recollects how during his prison days he had sent a letter to the regional comrades. He had enlisted the reasons why their project had failed, also stating, how it would be best to abort the mission and retreat to "safer shelters" to study and reconsider the struggle. His years as a political activist and a political prisoner were penned down as Communis (1975). This paper is a comparative study of the picture of the 1970s Calcutta that Sen and Bandyopadhyay present in Padatik and Communis respectively, with special attention to the youth upsurge and the violent mission that the contemporary youth had dedicated themselves to. Bandyopadhyay, through his words, paints an equally realistic portrait of the "infernal city" that Sen films in his Trilogy. While Bandyopadhyay has largely been an unsung hero in the canonical growth of Indian Literature, Sen has been a world phenomenon with his brand of parallel cinema. However, both of them offer criticism to the left movement, when it was lying low and was in disarray. The paper would thus assess both their differences and their similarities in their reception and representation of the movement, its ideology, and its subversion.

Artistic features of portrait works of people’s artist Huseyngulu Aliev

Achieving a realistic view of the image on canvas or paper is a key requirement of the portrait genre. Since the establishment of the professional school of painting, the portrait has attracted the attention of Azerbaijani artists and has been widely used in their work. Thus, in our miniatures of the Middle Ages, as well as among the paintings created in the XIX–XXI centuries, you can find beautiful, eye-catching portraits with high artistic value. Thus, the portrait has always occupied one of the main places in Azerbaijani painting. Of course, the main object of the portrait genre is a person, so its spiritual world and position in society is the main theme of fine art. For many years, portraits in Azerbaijani painting have been mainly dedicated not only to creative intellectuals, but also to workers, collective farmers and labor pioneers. In portraits, on the one side, there is a generalization of images, and on the other side, there is a more democratic approach to the selection of models. The characters in the portraits are close people, friends, relatives of the artists, or strangers who are attracted only by their appearance. Elements of painting in the human image of Azerbaijani artists attract attention: color, texture experiment, spatial elements, format, etc. It is known that in order to create a realistic portrait, artists must master the perception of emotions in a person’s environment, as well as master the art of realist painting. Throughout the development of the portrait genre, artists are engaged in research, trying to convey the true image of a person in an objective way. In the portrait genre, the image of the century was clearly visible. In the portraits of Azerbaijani artists, generalized, energetic, strong images are often replaced by psychologically complex characters. There is a growing interest in the spiritual world of images, the tendency to reach the depths of thought and intellect, to create a portrait with a rich spiritual content. Portraits created by Azerbaijani artists in modern times differ in their main features, such as deep spirituality and strict intellect.

THE WORLD OF CHARECTERS IN VIETNAMESE MEDIEVAL CHUANQI GENRE

Characters in Vietnamese medieval Chuanqi genre are rich and diverse, with a full range of components, class, caste, gender, habits, and dignity. Based on the reality-fantasy relationship, the world of chuanqi characters can be divided into two main groups: fantasy characters and earthly characters (people in the real life). They represent two realms: of unreality and of reality. Fantasy character is a surreal character with mystical capacity and strange traits. From the rational perspective, this type of character absolutely does not exist in real life. By contrast, earthly character are people who exist in daily life with ideals, ambitions, happiness and suffering. The presence of two types of characters clearly demonstrates the realistic portrait in the status of the unreal and real invasions, which deeply consists of their own imprints in the Chuanqi genre. From the world of characters in Vietnamese medieval Chuanqi genre, the evolution of this genre is also revealed.

Penalized estimation of the Gaussian graphical model from data with replicates.

Gaussian graphical models are usually estimated from unreplicated data. The data are, however, likely to comprise signal and noise. These two cannot be deconvoluted from unreplicated data. Pragmatically, the noise is then ignored in practice. We point out the consequences of this practice for the reconstruction of the conditional independence graph of the signal. Replicated data allow for the deconvolution of signal and noise and the reconstruction of former's conditional independence graph. Hereto we present a penalized Expectation‐Maximization algorithm. The penalty parameter is chosen to maximize the F‐fold cross‐validated log‐likelihood. Sampling schemes of the folds from replicated data are discussed. By simulation we investigate the effect of replicates on the reconstruction of the signal's conditional independence graph. Moreover, we compare the proposed method to several obvious competitors. In an application we use data from oncogenomic studies with replicates to reconstruct the gene‐gene interaction networks, operationalized as conditional independence graphs. This yields a realistic portrait of the effect of ignoring other sources but sampling variation. In addition, it bears implications on the reproducibility of inferred gene‐gene interaction networks reported in literature.

The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction by John Christopher Hamm

Reviewed by: The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction by John Christopher Hamm Lehyla G. Hewardlehyla.heward@um.edu.mt John Christopher Hamm. The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 299 pp. $70.00 (cloth). John Christopher Hamm's The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction brings the topic of genre fiction off the sidelines of modern Chinese literature and into center field. The clever and perceptive narrative revolves around the novelist Xiang Kairan (向愷然 1895–1957), who wrote under the pen name Buxiaosheng (不肖生) or "The Unworthy Scholar" and is considered to be the father of Republican-era martial arts fiction (武俠小說 wuxia xiaoshuo). John Christopher Hamm establishes a scholarly approach to Xiang Kairan that, on the one hand, pays homage to the nostalgia that martial arts fiction often evokes in general readers and, on the other, newly conceptualizes the oft-discussed foundations of modern Chinese literature. Moreover, Hamm presents an enlightening characterization of the publishing networks that formed the basis for Chinese genre fiction. The book is a relevant reminder that Chinese genre fiction, especially considering our current age of translating and promoting it to global audiences, came of age during the commercialization of literature in 1920s Shanghai. Hamm uses the discussion about Republican-era modes of production as a springboard to theorize about what he calls "the poetics of xiaoshuo," especially "the value of xiaoshuo and presumptions about its limitations that echo critiques by contemporary progressive critics yet derive from premodern discourse on the genre" (12). One of the central arguments in The Unworthy Scholar is that xiaoshuo inherently invites transmission, a crucial facet of literary discourse. The theoretical crux of this research centers on "a moral ambivalence woven into the poetics of xiaoshuo" (185). Hamm demonstrates that xiaoshuo was historically seen as corrupt due to its commitment to the strange and its representation of unofficial histories. The irony is that the term xiaoshuo came to be used by May Fourth intellectuals as a tool not only to represent reality but also to inculcate modern values into society. Although May Fourth intellectuals redefined and reappropriated xiaoshuo to align their pursuit of writing fiction with Western practices, Hamm stresses that the idea of fiction itself was subject to debate. Hamm successfully shows how the literary discourse around xiaoshuo impacted the way that Xiang Kairan's work was produced and received (2). Here transmission plays an important role. Unlike May Fourth and New Literature intellectuals, who expressly elevated their individual subjectivity, the author-narrator Xiang Kairan was a chain in the link of transmission, not the "unitary source" (52). Hamm states that Xiang Kairan "makes no claim to be moved to write by any need for self-expression; nor does he present writing fiction as a vital tool for the advancement of any of the political or societal agendas…much less of the enlightenment agenda claimed by the New Literature" (38). Hamm's arguments produce an equilibrium (as opposed to a continuum of sorts) between the literary discourses of the Ming and Qing periods and that of the May Fourth era. Hamm recognizes parallels that shine a spotlight onto Xiang Kairan's performance upon the tightrope of changing literary values. In terms of methodology, Hamm's most notable contributions are the middle chapters wherein he discusses the publishing networks and periodicals through which Xiang Kairan gained his reputation. These chapters provide readers, especially those wanting to know more about Republican-era mass media, with a realistic portrait of how popular literature [End Page E-26] was marketed and disseminated. Hamm argues that a new notion of genre was deployed as a marketable category and that crucial to its success was the confluence of a high-profile author using a distinct medium, form, and theme (12). The economics of the publishing world thus illustrate how wuxia fiction and xiaoshuo as a concept passed from the traditional realm into the modern era, which is a vital element in Hamm's conceptualization of transmission in the poetics of xiaoshuo. Indeed, Hamm's heterodox arguments about how Xiang Kairan participated in modernity would have run the risk of...

Working From 'Rooms of Their Own': For a Realistic Portrait of Joyce Gutteridge CBE and Other Trailblazing Women

Working From 'Rooms of Their Own': For a Realistic Portrait of Joyce Gutteridge CBE and Other Trailblazing Women

Le réel à l’épreuve de la fiction dans « Khalil » de Yasmina Khadra

<p class="Corps">In <em>Khalil</em>, Yasmina Khadra paints a realistic portrait of a terrorist. This novel written in 2018 and developed from a real fact, blurs the spaces of reality and fiction to reveal the apparently unavowable thoughts of a jihadist. It is this detour strategy that this article will seek to clarify. It will be a question of studying how Yasmina Khadra organizes a scrambling of these two worlds, the fictional space and the realistic space, located at the edge of each other, to make them interact, confront each other but also to question.</p>

La crueldad como instrumento de la tragedia en Los olvidados de Luis Buñuel

Este trabajo analiza la película Los olvidados (1950), de Luis Buñuel, de acuerdo con la filosofía trágica de Clément Rosset. Mi investigación se centra en discutir el concepto de ‘crueldad’ y su conexión con lo trágico, así como desgranar los elementos que permiten leer la película como una tragedia en el sentido clásico. El trabajo sugiere cómo el retrato realista que Buñuel realiza sobre los jóvenes de los suburbios de Ciudad de México sigue el principio de crueldad acuñado por el filósofo, según el cual una obra artística (o filosófica) debe ser cruel y representar la verdad sin atenuantes, sin tomar partido por ninguna clase de moral. Se acomete un análisis de la crueldad como categoría estética clave en la consecución de la tragedia y se ponen en relación con la película términos clave del concepto de lo trágico.

Language abilities of children with refugee backgrounds: Insights from case studies

AbstractSince 2015, more than 58,000 Syrian refugees have settled in Canada and, at the time of the 2016 national census, more than a fifth had settled in the province of Quebec. The rising numbers of refugees and the risks associated with families’ forced displacement have underscored the need to better understand and support the language of refugee children. The article reports on the oral language of three Syrian children ages five and six years, drawing on data from parent interviews, teacher reports, measures of the children’s language, and observations of their language use in a dual-language stimulation group, StimuLER. By triangulating this data, we were able to develop a rich and realistic portrait of each child’s language abilities. For these three boys, we observed that the home language was vulnerable to delays and weaknesses, and that learning the language of school was a drawn-out process. We also documented that parents and teachers had difficulties communicating with one another, and thus had difficulty meeting the educational needs of these children. We conclude that to foster resiliency in these children who are refugees, schools must find a way to build bridges with the parents to support the children’s language learning in both the language of school and at home.