AI discovers the mysterious details hidden in Raphael’s famous masterpiece

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be trained see pictures for details tthe hat eludes the human eye. Now, an artificial intelligence neural network has discovered something unusual about the face in Raphael’s painting: it wasn’t actually painted by Raphael.

The face in question is that of Saint Joseph, seen in the upper left of the painting known as Madonna della Rosa (or Madonna Rozova).

In fact, scholars have long debated whether this painting is an original by Raphael. Although a variety of evidence is needed to determine the provenance of an artwork, 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 United States developed a own analysis algorithm based on works that we know are the result of the brush of the Italian master.

“Using deep feature analysis, we used photographs of authenticated Raphael paintings to teach the computer to recognize his style in great detail, from brushstrokes, color palette, shading, and every aspect of the work,” says Hasan, a mathematician and computer scientist. Ugaila from the University of Bradford in Great Britain explained 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 taught on a huge set of examples, which is not always available when it comes to the work of a single artist. In this case, the team modified a pre-trained architecture developed by Microscoft called ResNet50, combined with a traditional machine learning technique called Support Vector Machine.

This method has previously been shown to have a 98 percent accuracy rate when it comes to identification Paintings by Raphael. He usually trains on whole pictures, but here the team also asked him to look at individual faces.

While 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 Despite the authenticity of the painting, it is believed that the face of Saint Joseph is worse than the others in the frame.

“When we tested della Rosa overall, the results were inconclusive.” said Ugail.

“So we checked individual parts, and while the rest of the image was confirmed as Raphael, Joseph’s face turned out to be 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 technologies revealing secrets classic paintings – this time with AI.

The Madonna della Rosa Experts believe that it was written on canvas in 1518-1520. It was in the mid-1800s that art critics began to suspect that Raphael might not have written all the works.

Now, those suspicions are almost certainly proven true, although the research team behind the study is keen to emphasize that this AI will help art critics in the future, not to replace them.

“This is not a case of artificial intelligence taking away people’s jobs.” said Ugail. “The process of authenticating a work of art involves consideration of many aspects, starting with its provenance, pigments, condition of the work, etc.

“However, such software can be used as one tool to assist in this process.”

The study was published in Science of heritage.

A previous version of this article was published in December 2023.

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