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Artificial Intelligence reveals mysterious details hidden in Raphael’s famous masterpiece


Artificial intelligence (AI) can be trained to see details in images that escape human eyes. An artificially intelligent neural network discovered something unusual about the face in Raphael’s painting: The face was not actually painted by Raphael.


The face in question is the face of St. Joseph, seen in the upper left corner of the painting known as Our Lady. della rosa (or Madonna of the Roses).

In fact, scientists have long debated whether this painting is an original by Raphael. Although a variety of evidence is needed to determine the provenance of a work of art, a new analysis method based on an artificial intelligence algorithm has sided with those who believe that at least some of the strokes were made by the hand of another artist.

Researchers from Great Britain and the USA have developed a special analysis algorithm based on works that we know to be the work of the Italian master.

One of these faces is different from the others. (Prado National Museum)

“Using deep feature analysis, we used photographs of actual Raphael paintings to teach the computer to recognize Raphael’s style in great detail, from brush strokes to color palette, shading and every aspect of the work,” says Hasan, a mathematician and computer scientist. Ugyle, of the University of Bradford in Great Britain, announced this in December when the researchers’ findings were published.

“A computer can see much deeper than the human eye, down to the microscopic level.”

Machine learning processes as a rule need to be trained on a large number of examples, and this is not always possible when it comes to the work of a single artist. In this case, the team modified a pre-trained architecture developed by Microsoft called ResNet50 by combining it with a traditional machine learning technique called Support Vector Machine.

This method has previously been shown to have a 98 percent accuracy rate in identifying Raphael paintings. He usually trains on entire images, but here the team also asked him to look at individual faces.

Although the Madonna, Child and St. John appear to be the work of Raphael, this is not the case with St. Joseph. Researchers note that in previous debates about the painting’s authenticity, it was thought that St. Joseph’s face was depicted worse than others in the frame.

Joseph diagram
Someone else probably appropriated St. Joseph. (Ugail et al., Heritage Science 2023)

“When we check della rosa overall the results were not conclusive,” Ugail said.

“So we checked individual pieces, and while the rest of the image was confirmed to be Raphael, it became clear that Joseph’s face was most likely not Raphael.”

Giulio Romano, one of Raphael’s students, may have been responsible for the fourth face, but this is by no means certain. This is another example of modern technology revealing the secrets of classical paintings, this time with the help of artificial intelligence.

“Madonna Della Rosa” According to experts, it was written on canvas in 1518-1520. In the mid-1800s, art critics began to suspect that Raphael may not have written all the works.

While these suspicions have now almost certainly been proven true, the research team behind the study is keen to emphasize that this AI will assist art experts in the future, not replace them.

“This doesn’t mean AI is taking away people’s jobs,” Ughail said. “The process of verifying the authenticity of a work of art involves taking into account many aspects, including its origin, pigments, condition of the work, etc.

“But such software can be used as a tool to assist in this process.” The study was published on: Heritage Science.

Source: Port Altele

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