Voshart’s goal “was not to romanticize emperors or make them seem heroic,” he says on Medium. Instead, “my approach was to favor the bust that was made when the emperor was alive. Otherwise, I favored the bust made with the greatest craftsmanship and where the emperor was stereotypically uglier—my pet theory being that artists were likely trying to flatter their subjects.”

While I admire his reasoning for trying to subvert what in all likelihood is the fundamental desire of artists to keep getting paid, he does make perhaps one mistaken assumption. Namely in that Romans were notorious for their political propaganda, and it's wholly possible crafting ugly depictions of political rivals was also quite common. Just something to keep in mind.

Case in point is Nero, for in Nero's time the political propaganda was so immense that it ENTIRELY obscured history it was so contentious. We have whole libraries of propaganda surrounding Nero and basically nothing we can rely upon as fact, and then there's the later Catholic mythmaking about the Neronian fire and myth of Neronian persecution. I find it more likely than not the busts he chose to base Nero on were fictitious depictions that were made specifically to inspire disgust, not truth, given how much of the propaganda at the time of Nero's opponents did the same thing.