Artificial intelligence (AI) can be trained to notice details in images that the human eye misses; An AI neural network recently noticed something unusual about a face in a Raphael painting: it was not painted by the famous artist.
The face in question is that of St. Joseph, seen at the top left of the painting known as the Madonna della Rosa (or Madonna of the Rose).
In fact, scholars have long debated the authenticity of the painting and questioned whether it was an original by Raphael.
The new analysis method, based on an artificial intelligence algorithm, has vindicated those who questioned certain parts of the image, according to a new study published Dec. 21 in the journal Heritage Science.
“Through extensive feature analysis, we used images of authenticated paintings by Raphael to teach the computer to recognize his style down to the smallest detail, from brush strokes to color palette, shading, and every other aspect of the work,” says Hassan Ugail, mathematician and Computer scientist at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom.
“The computer sees much deeper than the human eye, down to the microscopic level,” he added.
If in the painting in question the figures of the Madonna, Child and Saint Jean were all apparently created by Raphael's hand, this is not the case with Saint-Joseph, who has also been criticized by scholars for being less well portrayed than other characters in previous debates .
“So we tested the different parts and while it was confirmed that the rest of the painting was by Raphael, it was believed that the face of Joseph was probably not by Raphael,” Mr Ugail explained.
Giulio Romano, one of Raphael's students, could be the origin of the fourth sight, but nothing is less certain.
According to experts, the Madonna della Rosa was painted on canvas between 1518 and 1520. In the mid-19th century, art critics began to suspect Raphael of not having painted the entire work.