The author of a Renaissance painting identified thanks to artificial intelligence

MISE À DAY

The author of a Renaissance painting has been identified thanks to artificial intelligence after 40 years of research by a collector. 

George Lester Winward, who had acquired it in 1981, suspected the Italian Raphaël (1487-1520) of being its painter.

Shortly before his death, he bequeathed the painting to the De Brécy fund, in France, so that researchers can have access to it.

The de Brécy Tondo is now thought to be by Raphael. Definitely.

This is because of its similarity to Raphael's Sistine Madonna but mainly because AI says so. Gone are the days of reliable connoisseurship. Facial recognition is not the way to assign value (monetary or otherwise) pic.twitter.com/DYfrErIYFk

— Madeleine Emerald (@emeraldthiele) January 25, 2023

It was finally the British universities of Nottingham and Bradford who managed to make the impressive discovery thanks to a recognition tool easy by comparing Raphael's Sistine Madonna with De Brécy Tondo, both very similar.

“Looking at the faces with the human eye, there is an obvious similarity, but the computer can see deeper than us, in thousands of dimensions, at the pixel level”, explains one of the professors responsible for the work.

The software has shown that these two works are 97% identical when we consider it to be the same artist if this percentage reaches 75% or more.

The issuance of a certificate of authenticity is always uncertain.

– According to information from BFM