With his flowing locks, long beard, and worn robes, Jesus is one of the most instantly recognisable figures in the Western world. So it comes as no surprise that his face is also regularly spotted in inanimate objects. This is due to'face pareidolia' - a common brain phenomenon in which a person sees faces in random images or patterns. 'Sometimes we see faces that aren't really there,' explained Robin Kramer, Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology, at University of Lincoln, in an article for The Conversation. 'You may be looking at the front of a car or a burnt piece of toast when you notice a face-like pattern. 'This is called face pareidolia and is a mistake made by the brain's face detection system.'

An artist has created a'very realistic' image of the Virgin Mary using AI, showing her as a teenage girl with long black hair, dark eyes and a darker complexion. Miguel Ángel Omaña Rojas, from Mexico, reconstructed the face of the Virgin of Guadalupe as she appeared on a cloth worn by St Juan in Mexico more than 700 years ago. The technology spent weeks analyzing the image of Mary, studying each component' to'capture gestures and expressions in a dynamic way.' The image of the Virgin Mary, they said, allows the world'to finally see what the most famous woman... looked like in real life.' While Mary was believed to be Middle Eastern, cultures have changed her appearance to fit their local populations, such as why the Virgin of Guadalupe is portrayed with a combination of Indigenous and European heritage.

Last fall, the artist and musician Holly Herndon visited Torreciudad, a shrine to the Virgin Mary associated with the controversial Catholic group Opus Dei, in Aragón, Spain. The sanctuary, built in the nineteen-seventies, sits on a cliff overlooking an inviting blue reservoir, in a remote area just south of the Pyrenees. Herndon and her husband, Mathew Dryhurst, had been on a short vacation in the mountains nearby. They were particularly taken with an exhibit of Virgin Mary iconography from around the world: a faceless, abstract stone carving from Cameroon; a pale, blue-eyed statuette from Ecuador; a Black Mary from Senegal, dressed in an ornate gown of blue and gold. Moving from art work to art work, the couple discussed Mary's "embedding."