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"And needless to say, [John Smith] was a short, portly brown-head [left] — Not the golden-haired Adonis we see before us in the movie [right]."
In a nutshell, this is the tendency to make Historical Domain Characters look much better in movies/comics than they actually did (or are reported to have been by the sources of their time), and/or to fit their looks to the standard of the culture the work is made for.
Even when sources state that someone was attractive, this was of course according to the standards of their contemporaries. Certain characteristics, such as clear skin, shiny hair and a certain evenness of the face are universally liked, as they show health. The assessment of all the rest (body type, skin color, facial features) though, varies with the vogue of the time and place. While some of the clothing people used to wear is seen as Gorgeous Period Dress, other fashion and hairstyle choices were also not exactly in line with current tastes.
A visual version of Woolseyism. A historical figure regarded as attractive by contemporaries is depicted as attractive according to modern standards, preventing his/her good looks from becoming Informed Attractiveness.
Medieval Morons is as unrealistic as The Beautiful Elite, but the population of former times certainly lacked the comforts of modern technology and therefore, unless stated otherwise, it is safe to assume that the "hero" of one's story carried the marks of a harsh life without proper medicine and full of dangers and hard physical labour; and no toothpaste either - though it was only the advent of (cane) sugar that really led to bad teeth en masse.
One would think the advent of photography might curb this practice, but in the end we all just love looking at attractive people too much to let little things like actual history keep us from imagining them as gorgeous. This trope is of course one of the oldest ones there is. When no one knows how the historical person really looked like, all bets are off.
Compare Historical Hero Upgrade, Beauty Equals Goodness, Adaptational Attractiveness, Hollywood Homely, and Hotter and Sexier.
Examples
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Several Media
- Calamity Jane
 was often mistaken for a man, and not just because she often wore men's clothing. However, she's been played by Doris Day◊. Deadwood goes part of the way toward averting this, and even has Jane tell an anecdote about being mistaken for a man, but Robin Weigert is still far more attractive than the real thing. The Lucky Luke album Calamity Jane averts it all the way◊ and then some◊.
- Cleopatra◊ was subject to this even in her own day. The legend of her beauty comes partially from Octavian's propaganda that Marc Antony had been bewitched by her. Over the years, Cleopatra is typically portrayed as each generation's version of their ideal beauty. She's sometimes even given a Race Lift, despite the fact that she was of Macedonian descent. However, portraits of her give her a noticeably large nose; there is even an oft-repeated famous quip about what a long nose Cleo had. Plutarch describes her as not particularly attractive, but with a beautiful voice and charming personality. Cicero also downplays her appearance, though he is a biased source.
- The problem with Cleopatra is she was such a Base Breaker that no one person's account can really be trusted. Those that liked her would sing endless praises on her beauty while those who didn't would find any excuse to insult her. Since nearly all accurate depictions of her were destroyed after her death, we may never get a good idea of how Cleopatra actually looked.
- Robespierre, though this definitely influenced by the sympathies of the artist or casting director. Portraits during his rise to power show him as quite attractive, while he gets less attractive during his downfall. When he's given the Historical Villain Upgrade, he's often shown as quite ugly. In the interest of making its point, the Sandman chapter titled "Thermidor" makes him appear decidedly overweight as well.
- Saint-Just. Unfortunately, people tend to take Saint-Just's physical appearance (long-haired, young, fairly attractive, gold hoop earrings) and extrapolate his personality off of it. This makes him him into something of a hippie. Or, of course, they might exaggerate the original and also make him a gay Communist pedophile with rage issues.
- Jane Austen.
- For a recent edition of one of her books, one of the very few existing pictures finally made it to its traditional place over the back cover blurb. The picture is a pencil drawing, showing her with a somewhat critical/thoughtful expression and a cap, which was usually out-of-doors daywear in her period. On the "improved" one, she's barely recognizable, has the standard perfectly smooth face and no cap.
- In Becoming Jane, she is portrayed by, of all people, Anne Hathaway.
- Inverted in Old Harry's Game, though this could simply be because she's in Hell.
- Mary Queen of Scots - at least, if her early portraits are to be believed, was quite beautiful when she first entered Scotland, but most depictions of her that are even halfway sympathetic portray her as still being pretty up until her execution, when in real life she had started to wear a wig and no doubt suffered from the lead-based makeup popular at the time.
- Anne Boleyn also tends to get some judicious upgrading. While the famous reports of her gigantic mole and extra finger are now considered mostly disreputable, more reliable contemporary descriptions suggest that she was, at best, a mildly attractive woman with striking eyes. Her powerful personality seems to have been the real attraction.
- Abraham Lincoln is generally treated with a variation of this. Though it is well-known from photographs what he looked like (i.e. ugly), and he self-deprecated his own looksnote "In my poor, lean lank face nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting.", he lived before sound recording. Because he was wise and solemn and had gravitas, he is almost always portrayed as having a deep, reassuring voice. Contemporary accounts, however, report that his voice was unusually high-pitched and sharp. His poor looks and voice are hardly ever used in media deceptions outside of the rare documentary.
- Except for the recent 2013 Steven Spielberg's movie, "Lincoln", where Daniel Day-Lewis did a good job recreating Lincoln's voice.
- Also, even though nowadays we see pictures of Lincoln and we recognise him quite unattractive, his acquintances thought different. As stated by General James B. Fry, his "expression in repose was sad and dull; but his ever-recurring humor, at short intervals, flashed forth with the brilliancy of an electric light". Walt Whitman commented that, despite being plain ugly at first glance, his kindliness, sagacy, sense of humour and common sense made him appear different; that laughter transformed and embellished his features. Lincoln seems to be one of those people that made an impression. Personal charm and magnetism turned his ugliness into attractiveness, something pictures can't provide, especially since there is no known picture of him smiling.
- Richard III
- Inverted with Richard III by William Shakespeare where the handsome Richard was turned into a palsied, foul hunchback. But Shakespeare was writing the play for the royalty descended from those who defeated Richard. In the 1995 movie he also is made to look a great deal like Adolf Hitler, not surprising as the film in set in the 1930s and the House of York is shown quite consciously modeling itself on the National Front (British Nazi sympathizers in the '30s).
- Sharon Kay Penman's revisionist novel The Sunne In Splendour takes this route straight, with a rather bishonen Richard.
- The Shinsengumi as a whole but especially Okita Souji who tends to be depicted as extremely bishonen (so much that sometimes a female actor depicts him in live action). However contemporary accounts describe him as a tall, dark, and thin man with high cheekbones, a wide mouth, and a "flatfish" face.
- Boudica, the British queen who rebelled against Roman rule, was noted for her imposing height and bearing, and, of course, her iconic red hair, but later depictions tend to place her very definitely in Amazonian Beauty territory. A rare exception is the eponymous 2003 British production (known as "Warrior Queen" in the United States), which starred the attractive but believable Alex Kingston.
- Count Vronsky, the romantic hero of Anna Karenina, is depicted in the text as balding and with a mouthful of rotten teeth. Don't expect either of these characteristics to make it into any dramatization. Bad dental hygiene was commonplace in Russia (and most of Europe) at that time, so contemporary audiences would not have seen any Narm in this depiction of an accomplished seducer.
- Recently, there was some controversy surrounding the Catholic church's decision to photoshop pictures of Saint Mary Mackillop to make her more "appealing" for merchandising reasons. She went from a "frumpy elderly nun◊" to a beautiful young woman with piercing dark eyes.
- Similarly, Blessed Laura Vicuña used to be represented as a conventionally cute and European-looking pre-teen thanks to a famous portrait by an Italian painter, which was even used in her official beatification ceremony; said artist's work was based on a very idealised description by Laura's surviving younger sister, given to him decades after Laura's early death. In The Nineties, one of Laura's biographies had a group photo of a group of schoolgirls that included a Laura who did NOT look like the until-then official portrait; years later, an investigation team confirmed that the real Laura was a dark-skinned child with Native looks, instead of the lily-white kid everyone knew.
- Saint Maria Goretti was reportedly rather cute, but she was still a country girl who lived a rather hard life and more or less looked like this◊. A good part of the artwork featuring her tends to make◊ her◊ much prettier◊. (Fully sealed with by the very cute child actresses Ines Orsini◊ and Martina Pinto◊ playing her.)
- Jesus is probably one of best examples of this trope (though definitely not the oldest). Ignoring controversy over a historic Jesus , most Western depictions tend to favor a tall, slender borderline-Bishōnen man with pale skin, long brown hair, deep soulful eyes (blue being surprisingly common), and a neat beard. Many other cultures and ethnic groups have likewise developed their own depictions (e.g. Hispanic Jesus, Black Jesus, Raptor Jesus)that tend to fit their own ideas of beauty and ethnicity. Hardly surprising when the person in question is literally worshiped as a deity. Any historic figure, however, would have had features more appropriate to a first century Middle Eastern Jew, e.g. swarthy skin, dark hair and eyes, and a beard would almost certainly be present. Assuming that biblical sources can be trusted the Gospel of Matthew states that when Jesus was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane the soldiers were unable to tell Jesus apart from his disciples indicating that he probably had roughly average features and height (about 5'1"). Likewise in 1 Corinthians Paul both claims to have seen Jesus and states that long hair on a man is a disgrace. Short hair was likewise more typical of men in his particular place and time and given his ethnicity it was most likely tightly curled (though only his hairdresser knows for sure).
- One reason why images of Jesus are so often idealized is because many Christians are quite sensitive to how he is portrayed, and tend to consider the historically accurate image of Jesus to be "ugly" and "dirty." To these critics, the "realistic" Jesus looks less like authenticity and more like an attempt to downplay his divine status or even mock him.
- The most iconic version of Jesus would be the one that appeared in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper" painting. However Leonardo, like all artists of his time and before, usually painted mythical figures as what they would have envisioned, resulting in the long-haired, white-skinned man we know today. This is in no small part because the painting was done as a commission by the local temple, so in all likelihood Leonardo knew that this was inaccurate, but chose to do it to please his client.
- Amelia Earhart wasn't ugly, but she wasn't exactly ideal. She even had the nickname "Lady Lindy," partially because she looked like Charles Lindbergh. Expect her to be played only by stunningly beautiful (if usually tomboyish) actresses.
Anime & Manga
- Rose of Versailles is a textbook example of this. Virtually every Historical Domain Character is just as much The Beautiful Elite as the original characters. Admittedly, in Parisian society at the time, one pretty much had to be breathtaking at every public event, but this being a shojo series, Bishie Sparkles abound.
- Black Butler has Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a major character in a recent arc. Instead of a guy with a bushy mustache◊, he's a clean shaven bishounen.
- In a similar vein, Rurouni Kenshin was known to portray historical figures in more flattering means. Observe:
- Alexander Pushkin looks better in ''Bronze Angel'' than he did in Real Life.
- Bungaku Daishi or 'Male Literary Figures' is a book published with manga art profiling famous authors - Marquisde Sade, Franz Kafka, Hans Christian Andersen, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, Junichirō Tanizaki (The Makioka Sisters), Miguel de Cervantes, The Brothers Grimm, and poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire... All of them are depicted as bishonen.
- Afterschool Charisma: A manga populated by the teenage clones of various famous people, all of whom are uniformly gorgeous. Some of them are people who were well-known for being beautiful in real life, but "gorgeous bishie teenage Freud" and "gorgeous bishie teenage Napoleon" kind of strain credulity.
Film
- Iron Jawed Angels is a pretty emotionally intense retelling of the victorious last years of the Woman's Suffrage Movement. And, of course, many of the Suffragettes were very beautiful, but they certainly weren't that smokin' hot.
- The 2006 film Lonely Hearts was about Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez◊. It starred Salma Hayek and Jared Leto. Also a Race Lift, as Beck was Caucasian and Fernandez was Spanish.
- Elizabeth I of England is often portrayed by beautiful actresses, though in her youth she was praised as being unconventionally beautiful.
- Elizabeth's sister Mary Tudor is often subject to inversions. She was said to be fairly pretty in her youth and average as she got older but adaptations often portray her as the ugly sister since any adaptation that has the two sisters will automatically have Elizabeth as the sympathetic one. She was portrayed as fat, too, in Elizabeth, whereas (at least until the cancer bloated her) the Real Life Mary was a rail-thin waif who made even the svelte Elizabeth look plump.
- You don't really think the mother of Alexander the Great, Queen Olympias, really looked like Angelina Jolie, do you? In any case, historical record has her as a very pale redhead.
- Debbie Reynolds as The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Kathy Bates in Titanic was much closer to the genuine article◊, but still prettied up a bit.
- Nicky Arnstein in Funny Girl, and some would also claim the title character falls prey to this. It's hard to say, though, that Barbra Streisand◊ is significantly more or less attractive than Fanny Brice◊.
- Greta Garbo playing Queen Christina of Sweden. Contemporary paintings and descriptions presented the queen as fairly ugly and butch. She also had traditionally male-like mannerisms, interests and way of dressing. All this has led some historians to speculate that she may have actually been biologically intersex.
- Red Cliff does this for several figures of the Three Kingdoms era in China. Both Takeshi Kaneshiro (Zhuge Liang) and Chang Chen (Sun Quan) have been "spokesmodels" in addition to their careers as actors. On the other hand, Zhou Yu (Tony Leung) and Xiao Qiao (Lin Chiling) are remembered as being attractive.
- Claire Danes playing autistic Temple Grandin in the film of the same name. While they don't really look like, Danes was able to imitate Grandin's voice perfectly despite getting to meet her only once.
- Valerie Plame isn't a bad-looking woman by any means but compared to Naomi Watts, well there just is no comparison.
- Clint Eastwood's 1920s period piece Changeling had Christine Collins, a very ordinary-looking woman, played by Angelina Jolie.
- In the German movie Jew Suss: Rise and Fall, not really ugly actor Moritz Bleibtreu plays Joseph Goebbels, of all people! It's possibly a case of the casting subverting Beauty Equals Goodness, since the real Goebbels was not that ugly-looking, it is just that many of the photographs of him show him either frowning or with distorted features while delivering one of his hate-filled speeches. Note that the actor who played his expy Garbitsch in The Great Dictator looked quite a bit more handsome than Hynkel (Hitler) or Herring (Goering).
- They went through all the trouble of uglying up Charlize Theron for her role as Aileen Wuornos in Monster and then made her love interest a beautiful Catholic schoolgirl instead of a hefty butch lesbian pushing thirty.
- The Runaways. Compare this to this.
- Has happened many times with Johnny Depp: he's played George Jung◊ in Blow, John Dillinger◊ in Public Enemies, J.M. Barrie◊ in Finding Neverland, Frederick Abberline◊ in From Hell and Joseph D. Pistone◊ in Donnie Brasco, all of whom were arguably somewhat less attractive than the man himself. However, he bears a reasonable actual resemblance to other people he's played, including Ed Wood◊, and he's also always up for making himself less attractive in roles, like when he accurately portrayed John Wilmot's horrible death from syphilis in The Libertine. He also wanted to have huge ears and a fake nose in Sleepy Hollow and a badly-reattached nose in Pirates of the Caribbean, but the studio execs said no in both cases, probably knowing why many people see his films in the first place.
- Blow does something that could be described as unintentional lampshading of this trope: after Depp has played George Jung for two hours, the movie ends with a photo of the real Jung, who doesn't look like Johnny Depp and isn't conventionally attractive at all. Since most viewers probably didn't know what the real George Jung looked like before seeing the movie, this moment of contrast can be pretty jarring.
- Amazing Grace, In which we have the short-even-by-the-standards-of-the-time, very near-sighted William Wilberforce◊, portrayed by Ioan Gruffudd◊.
- From the movie Downfall: Compare the real Traudl Junge◊, with this one.◊
- Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. Here's a comparison.◊
- Colin Farrell as John Smith in The New World. At least they got his hair color right.
- Averted in American Splendor, which not only had the actual people play themselves at several points but when they weren't went through the effort of actually making the actors resemble the people they were playing.
- Gettysburg also averted this by going the extra mile of actually making the actors as close as possible to their real-life counterparts. In fact the opening credits even emphasize this by showing each actor's name accompanied by a photo of the person they are playing- and then fading to a picture of the same person in a similar pose- as portrayed by whichever actor in the movie. Most (if not all) of them are almost identical, aided by the full beards popular at the time.
- While Patton got the physical appearance of the main character down, the real General Patton had a weak, rather high-pitched voice and reportedly hated giving public speeches. Meanwhile, one of the best remembered parts of the movie is Patton's confident speech in a deep, growling voice.
- Liam Neeson is much more handsome than the real Professor Alfred Kinsey, whom he portrayed in Kinsey. The man himself looked rather like a slightly overweight William H. Macy.
- He's also more handsome in Schindler's List than the real life Oskar Schindler, who was a stocky, balding man with a receding hairline.
- Ned Kelly
- This◊ is Australian outlaw Joe Byrne. Not a bad looking guy, actually. This◊ is Joe Byrne as portrayed by Orlando Bloom.
- This◊ is what Ned Kelly looked like. This◊ is what he looked like being played by Heath Ledger. (though Heath did get a beard later on in the film).
- Mostly averted in Argo. The actors playing the six diplomats in hiding look a lot like the actual people. By contrast, Affleck does not look much like Mendez (though Mendez was and is reasonably good-looking.)
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Paul Newman played Butch◊, Robert Redford and Katharine Ross◊ the Kid and Etta◊.
- The Baader Meinhof Complex: The real◊ Baader and Meinhof were a bit less photogenic than the movie◊ Baader and Meinhof.
Literature
- In-story example in The Wheel of Time: Nyneve is rather taken aback upon meeting Gaidal Cain, who, unlike his reincarnation partner Birgitte, is quite a bit uglier than the legends say.
- In the earliest Arthurian legend, Lancelot describes himself as "the ill-made [i.e., ugly] knight." In modern times and possibly because Lancelot is The Ace, we tend to think of him as the ruggedly handsome lancer to Arthur's faithful portrayal as a Bishōnen. T.H. White's The Once and Future King, however, takes it in the opposite direction and makes him almost hideously ape-like.
- Michael Crichton's novel Timeline nicely plays with this trope in one chapter, in which the inventors of the time-traveling device present film footage of historical events, which they recorded in secret while being there. The first film shows Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address in a nasal voice, which he is actually said to have had. The second film shows George Washington crossing the Delaware in the rain, sitting in a corner and wrapped in his mantle, rather than striking the painting's iconic pose.
- A Soviet Sci-Fi novel Kovrigin’s chronicles ("A girl near a steep", "Девушка у обрыва") by Vadim Shefner contains an in-universe example. A man remarks how all the depictions of a famous scientist's girlfriend follow that trope (the scientist asked that his name not be honored through memorials and such, so the people resort to honoring her instead).
- In J.T. Edson's Calamity Jane novels, Calamity is a stacked blonde who dresses in skintight buckskins. This is at odds with photographs of the historical Calamity Jane, who could charitably described as plain.
- This trope also applies to Edson's version of the outlaw Belle Starr.
- Played with and discussed in Animorphs "Elfangor's Secret". The kids realize that the guy they're looking for in the middle of the Battle of Agincourt is going to be the guy who looks clean and has good teeth and no sores. They also talk about it after landing on the banks of the Delaware during the Washington crossing the Delaware scene.
Live-Action TV
- In the third series of Black Adder, there's discussion about this in the episode "Duel and Duality". Baldrick suggests that he and Prince George can trade identities to avoid the Duke of Wellington's wrath. The Prince brings up the valid point that his portrait hangs on every wall, which is where Blackadder prompts Baldrick to quote his cousin Bert Baldrick, Mr. Gainsborough's butler's dogsbody:
Baldrick: He's heard that all portraits look the same these days, 'cos they're painted to a romantic ideal, rather than as a true depiction of the idiosyncratic facial qualities of the person in question.
- Of course, Prince George is arguably an example himself; in real life (and once in the show) he's described as being fat, while in Blackadder he's played by Hugh Laurie, who's anything but.
- The John Adams miniseries slightly averts this trope. While many of the actors are all very good-looking by today's standards, their characters all eventually fall prey to disadvantages that many people had to deal with in the 18th century, such as lack of dental hygiene, skin care and modern medicine.
- The Tudors is undisputed lord and master of this trope, with its parade of pouty-lipped sexpots in Gorgeous Period Dress. In later seasons, when Henry VIII would have been well into fatass modenote By the time he met Anne of Cleves, he had developed leg ulcers (nasty sores caused by high blood pressure and the strain of carrying his own weight), suggesting he was at least 400 pounds., His Fictional Majesty looks just as he did when he met Anne Boleyn, except for the beard. Fortunately, the producers had already stated they had no intention of even inviting realism for tea.
- Kate Beaton has fun with this.
- Justified in Henry's case: gaining the weight required or wearing a fat suit large enough to be even close to realistic would have been rather detrimental to Jonathan Rhys Meyers' health.
- Henry also didn't marry Anne Boleyn until he was nearly 42 in real life. In the series, he is portrayed as being young - twenties and early thirties - until he abruptly ages in the fourth season.
- Spiritual Successor The Borgias does a bit better averting this: most of the characters, if painted by Renaissance artists, wouldn't look too dissimilar from their real counterparts' portraits. There's a major offense, however, in the case of Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia: regardless of how attractive Irons himself is, he's still tall and slender and with a full head of hair where the real Rodrigo resembled a short, fat, bald bulldog of a man.
- For the most part, that's chalked up to the fact that it's Jeremy freakin' Irons. If he wanted to play Lucrezia Borgia, they'd find a way to make it work.
- Merlin has a lot of this trope, probably mostly because it's meant as a kids'/family series.
- Highly debatable. Since it can't be known if any of these characters even existed at all, we can't be sure what they might have looked like.
- The legendary Merlin was normally depicted as a shape-shifter with no true, stable form. He usually kept the frail old man's appearance while serving Arthur, but became a handsome youth to seduce maidens and at times isolated himself from humanity entirely by turning into a tree.
- Semi-aversion: Julius Caesar◊ was a rather striking-looking man in real life and Ciaran Hinds is a reasonably fair fit. That said, very few depictions (Rome included) give him his historically accurate thinning/receding hair in later life.
- And then, of course, there's your friend and mine Mark Antony. He's been portrayed as everything from drop-dead gorgeous (I'm looking at you, James Purefoy) to a distinctly ugly man with... other attractions.
- Even the actors aren't immune: Robin Williams himself got this treatment in Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Mork & Mindy. In real life, Robin Williams is, shall we say, an acquired taste due to his unique appearance. (Let's just say he didn't need a lot of makeup for the role of Peter Pan in Hook.) However, in this Made-for-TV Movie, he's played by Chris Diamantopoulos, who makes a generically attractive Robin... and is◊ Mr. Fanservice in Real Life.
- Little House on the Prairie: Michael Landon as Charles Ingalls. Landon was a lot better-looking than the person he portrayed on TV. Ingalls had a Santa Claus beard, but Landon was clean-shaven, even when he spent days or weeks without seeing a razor.
- There was a miniseries in 2005, in which he was played by Cameron Bancroft, with Hollywood hair and Perma Stubble. And Erin Cottrell played Caroline, a woman raised to believe it was immodest to wear her hair in a way that didn't cover her ears, in sort of a case of Historical Coquettishness Upgrade. Even Jack the dog was better-looking than in the source material.
- In the books after the move to Silver Lake, Caroline Ingalls does specifically say that a lady doesn't show her ears.
- Highlander has varying degrees. The Dark Ages flashbacks don't appear too badly done — there is some degree of dirtiness and shabbiness in them — but other flashbacks probably have the characters too cleaned up and good-looking.
- Forever Knight: justified that the vampires look good in their flashbacks, but human Nick gets into this trope before he is turned in the first episode flashback.
Theatre
Video Games
- Frederic Francois Chopin in Eternal Sonata. While he may have been handsome in real life, the game designers decided to make him full blown bishonen.
- Pretty much everyone in Sengoku Basara. We seriously doubt that the real Sanada Yukimura was ever the perpetually shirtless Bishōnen that he is in the game and anime series. Then again, everything else in Sengoku Basara is turned Up to Eleven as well.
- Liu Bei in Dynasty Warriors 6 and 7 is probably the most overt example of this trope coming into effect though, since he didn't rock the Biseinen look until those games.
- Special note goes to Akechi Mitsuhide. Both Sengoku Basara and Samurai Warriors portrayed him as a Bishōnen (morality is another story), whereas... do you know one of the reasons that caused him to betray Oda Nobunaga? Because he's insulted as 'kumquat head'.
- If there is such a thing as Mythical Beauty Upgrade, it applies to MANY characters from Fate/stay night. Gilgamesh becomes a Red-eyed, blond-haired Bishōnen. Rider ie Medusa becomes a perfect embodiment of a Fetish Fuel Station Attendant. Most changed is probably Saber King Arthur, who manages to do a Gender Flip into a beautiful girl.
- A rare villainous version: in Real Life, Cesare Borgia is said to have been disfigured enough by syphilis that he wore a mask in public, but in Assassins Creed Brotherhood, he looks like this. However, official portraits commissioned in his lifetime (such as this one◊) are very close to his depiction with Assassin's Creed, which may be based off of said portraits.
- Justified, as the historical portion of the story is a digital reconstruction of ancestral memory with holes in the memory being filled in with data.
- The other wiki listed above mentions that the novelization of Brotherhood mentions that he wore a mask to cover his face after having been deformed by the "New Disease", immediately followed by the actual historic fact discussed here. A clear case of Shown Their Work, if only for the book, and not for the game.
- In Age Of Empires III Henry the Navigator is portrayed as a bearded blonde in shining plate, resembling a medieval knight. He was actually much more like this. Might be artistic license, as he was the head of the Order of Christ (The Portuguese Templar branch) so they might have thought he would look knightish. Most probably it was intentional as it would only take a trip to Wikipedia.
- Henry ("Henrique" in Portuguese) the Navigator was the son of an English princess (Philippa of the House of Lancaster), and contemporary reports portrayed him as a tall, strong, blond-haired and bearded man. Under the orders of his father, King João I of Portugal, he took part of the conquest of Ceuta and fought the Moors in northern Africa, where he was knighted and made a member of the Order of Christ, a chivalry order. The portrait shown above in a link was made years after his death and it is not known if it depicts him correctly or even if it depicts him at all. So, yeah, the game Age of Empires III made no mistake.
- The trope is in full effect in Hakuouki. Some of the real-life members of the Shinsengumi, such as Hijikata Toshizo, were plenty attractive on their own, while others, like Saito Hajime, were... not. Regardless, in the Visual Novel and the anime series adapted from it, they're all portrayed as gloriously Bishōnen.
- Shadow Hearts features many historical characters, few of which resemble their real-life counterparts. Most notable would have to be Margarette G. Zelle. While a famous beauty, the real life Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (Mata Hari) was hardly the blue-eyed, blonde-haired bombshell seen in the game. Instead, she was dark-haired with dark eyes, and very modest in the chest department.
- The Civilization games do this to varying degrees depending on the specific game.
Webcomics
- Subverted - or not, depending on your tastes - by the depiction of Sappho in Amazoness!. Ancient accounts described her as "small and dark", and the comic depicts her as very small
at least compared to the 7' tall Amazons. At 4'7" she would only be about 5" shorter than the average 5'0" ancient Greek woman , very dark, and as a charming Butch Lesbian.
Web Original
Western Animation
- Liberty's Kids did this to, more or less, every historical figure on the show.
- John Smith seems to have shaved. And turned golden-haired. And gotten taller and considerably more buff for the Disney version of Pocahontas.
- And Pocahontas herself upgraded to a totally hot and fully grown woman rather than the 12-year old she really was. To be honest, the age change was just about inevitable.
- Not to mention that according to a contemporary depiction, she looked like this◊. Not bad, but not stunning.
Other
- When the ten-dollar bill was upgraded, Alexander Hamilton, despite already being handsome by many measures, was still given a streamlined face lift.
- This trope is by no means new. Paintings, statues, busts, etc. of royal and rich people were known to improve a person's appearance. One instance where it was especially common was during an arranged marriage. Many times, the betrothed wouldn't see each other until the day of the wedding, especially if there was great distance between them (like the children of two different kingdoms). The only way they would know what their future spouse would look like is through paintings, and artists were known to smooth out pockmarks and add and subtract a few inches.
- Queen Elizabeth I used this to her advantage to make people think she was young, healthy and attractive even when she had smallpox scars, grew old and lost her hair and wore a wig.
Baldrick: Well, my cousin Bert Baldrick, Mr. Gainsborough's butler's dogsbody, he says that he's heard that all portraits look the same these days, since they are painted to a romantic ideal, rather than as a true depiction of the idiosyncratic facial qualities of the person in question.
- This trope didn't work out quite so well when Elizabeth's father Henry VIII was shopping for a fourth wife. The famous painter Holbein did a portrait of Anne, a minor Princess of Cleves, which made the most of what beauty she did possess... but as Henry discovered when they met in person, that wasn't much. Henry had his aide Cromwell beheaded for screwing the situation up so badly. They did marry, but by Anne's own account the marriage was never consummated and she eventually consented to his offer of an amicable divorce. Ironically, this was great for Anne — outside of the lack of attraction, she and Henry got along really well as friends. She was allowed to remain in England for the rest of her (long) life, was good friends with both of her former stepdaughters, and Henry treated her like a sister, giving her expensive gifts and inviting her to all the events at court. AND she didn't get beheaded! Which shows how well she came ahead of the other wives. And cycling back to this page's trope, in the TV series 'The Tudors' she is played by Joss Stone.
- The Physics building of Chalmers University of Technology (Göteborg, Sweden) is decorated with a dozen sculptures, depicting famous Swedish scientists from Celsius onward. All are shown as idealistically beautiful - except Svante Arrhenius, who was still alive when the building was erected. His statue looks like he actually looked. Reportedly, he was none too pleased with this.
- Most Ancient Egyptian kings commissioned all their sculptures, tomb reliefs, and burial masks to depict them as youthful, attractive, and healthynote There were a few possible exceptions, such as Senwosret III. Hatshepsut even required depictions to make her male. But thanks to mummification, forensic scientists can reconstruct what many of them actually looked like.
- For example, Ramesses II lived to be a very old man (for the time) and was not in perfect health. Tutankhamun had an overbite, a slight cleft palate, and a club foot, and was probably not what we'd call handsome. Hatshepsut was, gasp!!, a woman. Don't expect contemporary artwork to depict them that way.
- In an inversion Akhenaten, Tutankhamun's father who tried unsuccessfully to replace the entire Egyptian religion with a new one, always had himself and his family depicted as pot-bellied androgyns with elongated, weird-looking faces. For years, Egyptologists wondered if it was artistic convention or hereditary deformity, until they identified his mummy and learned that no, he looked pretty average.
- Also, fairly recent research and examinations have shown that Hatshepsut was probably obese and afflicted with a nasty skin condition toward the end of her reign. Link here: http://www.livescience.com/7336-mummy-reveals-egyptian-queen-fat-balding-bearded.html
- The bust (not that kind) of Nefertiti was often held to be a depiction of her as stately and beautiful. A documentary showed that this was mostly due to the lighting since the bust was often illuminated for best presentation. Changing the lighting showed a bunch of wrinkles and a more aged looked.
- One reason why photography wasn't always successful in making people look more realistic is because all mainstream photography was black-and-white until the 1950s, and most of it still was until the 1980s. Black-and-white film is more light-sensitive and requires more artificial lighting in its setup, so people photographed in black-and-white are unnaturally illuminated, tend to appear "angelic", and are thus more physically attractive than they otherwise would be. (Unless, of course, the subject is shot in low-key photography, but that is usually reserved for villains, morally ambiguous characters, or people who are supposed to look unattractive to the viewer.) A second reason is that, at least in the nineteenth century, people getting photographed took the experience a lot more seriously than they do now. Photographers were all trained professionals, possessed a great deal of technical knowledge as well as artistic talent, and were thought of almost as photorealistic portrait painters than simply recorders of events. People always wore their best clothes for photos in those days. Men shaved and women put their hair up, and even the children wore suits. They certainly didn't look like that all the time.
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