Artificial Intelligence Identifies Long-Overlooked Raphael Masterpiece
When he bought the painting in 1981, art collector George Lester Winward was sure he’d stumbled upon a genuine Raphael.
The mysterious, 37-inch-long work had no known artist.
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Looking into the faces of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, Winward noticed an uncanny resemblance to the two figures at the center of another painting: the Sistine Madonna, a 77-inch-long Renaissance masterpiece completed by Raphael around 1513.
Winward became convinced that the same artist was behind both works. But his view was in the minority. Experts thought the painting, now known as the de Brécy Tondo, was more likely a Victorian copy of the Sistine Madonna.
Shortly before his death in 1997, Winward set up the de Brécy Trust, donating his paintings to the organization to allow researchers to continue rooting out their secrets. Scholars have been studying the de Brécy Tondo ever since.
Now, after 40 years of speculation, researchers from the University of Nottingham and the University of Bradford, both in the United Kingdom, have made a breakthrough. Using facial recognition technology and artificial intelligence (A.I.), they have concluded that the painting is “highly likely to be a Raphael masterpiece.”
“Looking at the faces with the human eye shows an obvious similarity, but the computer can see far more deeply than we can, in thousands of dimensions, to pixel level,” says Hassan Ugail, an expert on visual computing at Bradford who developed the A.I. facial recognition system used in the study, in a statement.
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