Find Your Ancient Doppelgänger For Free On This Museum’s Website

Are you more of a Caesar or a Venus?

My friend Sarah looks exactly like Scarlett Johansson and my cousin Shaun could be Matt Damon’s body double, but conversations about celebrity doppelgängers inevitably hit a wall when they get to me. Not so with ancient statues. Thanks to a new exhibit at the Musée de la civilisation (Museum of Civilization) in Quebec, I found my centuries-old double in no time. The website for the exhibit, which is titled “My 2000 Year Old Double,” will find you an ancient look-alike instantly. All you have to do is upload your photo and the museum uses a program called Betaface API that analyzes more than 120 facial features in order to find the best match within its collection of statues. (It’s the same software used in real-life video game simulations, advanced surveillance technology and some biometric data projects.)

My statue double is (quite plausibly, I’d say) Empress Faustina the Younger. Faustina was the wife (and first cousin) of Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor, and the mother of the rather-less-successful emperor Commodus. I was pleased with the match. Like me, Faustina wasn’t afraid to get in on the action: She was known for accompanying her husband on military campaigns. Aurelius named her “Mother of the Camp” and had her deified after her death. If you submit your photo, you and your look-alike could even be part of the exhibit. The artist behind this project, François Brunelle, will choose 30 of the online submissions to photograph for the exhibit that will run from Oct. 2018 to Oct. 2019. If you’re itching for an ancient look-alike, upload a picture and hope you get a badass empress doppelgänger like me (? ??).