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Curious to know what your favorite saint might have looked like? Artificial intelligence might just give you the answer. Franck Galbavy, a Slovak Catholic with a passion for photography, wanted to put his talents at the service of his faith. On Instagram, he posts regularly on his Time in Prayer account ultra-realistic faces of saints, created using Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program. In other words, these are fake images of real saints.
"Having previous experience and exposure in design, photography and painting, I used this visual skill to create images of Catholic saints from the time before photography, modeling them as I imagine they might have looked, while remaining true to their age, country and time," he sums up for Aleteia.
They have sweet smiles, sparkling eyes, and faces full of life. Although they appear in period costumes — more or less believable — the faces are surprisingly hyper-realistic and modern.
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In fact, they correspond in every way to the canons of beauty of our century. Perhaps that's why they have a familiar look, which seems to be present in every face.
"I also try to describe them as warm, friendly, and accessible to make them approachable," explains Franck Galbavy. “When I was looking for visuals of these saints, I realized that the existing representations didn't speak to me; they lacked warmth and appeal. This realization triggered my decision to create new visuals."
Using artificial intelligence, the 46-year-old enthusiast aims to create faces of Catholic saints to "help us better connect with them, understand their stories, and strengthen our faith," he explains.
"I distanced myself from the faith after growing up in a Catholic family," he told Aleteia. “However, at the lowest point of my life, I underwent a profound spiritual transformation thanks to the power of prayer, both from those who prayed for me and from my own prayers to God and the saints."
A veritable encyclopedia of saints
Franck Galbavy decided to put his talents at the service of the prayers of others. The creative process takes time and a great deal of inventiveness. “It takes me about an hour or two to create an image," he explains. “I run my first draft through a generative AI program that creates images from prompts. I then work through, in some cases, up to 100 iterations and adjustments until I get the desired result. The final version is refined in a photo editor before being published."
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Franck publishes a new image of a saint every day, including some of the most famous, but not only. His Instagram account, now followed by almost 14.5k people, is even becoming a veritable virtual encyclopedia on the lives of saints! You can discover the lives of St. Anthony of Padua and St. Zita, as well as little-known saints such as St. Catherine of Ricci, a 13th-century Italian mystic. Aesthetics aside, each publication is accompanied by a well-written biography.
However you feel about artificial intelligence, the quality of the images is well worth the detour: You've never seen the (imaginary) face of your patron saint so pleasant and realistic!
