The author of a Renaissance painting has been identified thanks to artificial intelligence after 40 years of research by a collector.
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George Lester Winward, who acquired it in 1981, assumed the Italian painter Raphael (1487-1520) to be the painter.
Shortly before his death, he bequeathed the painting to the De Brécy Fund in France for researchers to access.
The tondo of de Brécy is said to have come from Raphael today. Definitive.
This is because of the similarity to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, but mostly because AI says so. Gone are the days of reliable connoisseurship. Face recognition is not the way to assign value (monetary or otherwise). pic.twitter.com/DYfrErIYFk
— Madeleine Emerald (@emeraldthiele) January 25, 2023
Finally, it was the British universities of Nottingham and Bradford who, thanks to a simple detection tool, made the impressive discovery by comparing Raphael’s Sistine Madonna with de Brécy’s tondo, both very similar.
“If you look at the faces with the human eye, there is an obvious resemblance, but the computer can see much deeper than we can, in thousands of dimensions, at the pixel level,” explains one of the professors responsible for the work.
The software showed that these two works were 97% identical, being the same artist when this percentage reaches 75% or more.
Issuance of a certificate of authenticity is always uncertain.
– According to BFM