Artificial intelligence (AI) has made a groundbreaking discovery regarding a famous painting by Raphael. The AI’s neural network has uncovered a hidden detail about the painting that suggests the face of St. Joseph in the picture was not actually created by the artist himself.
The painting in question is called “Madonna della Rose” or “Madonna with a rose,” and St. Joseph’s face is located in the upper left corner of the artwork.
There has been considerable debate among scientists and art historians about whether this painting is truly the work of Raphael. However, a new analysis method based on an AI algorithm has lent support to the belief that certain elements in the painting were created by another artist.
Research teams from the United Kingdom and the United States collaborated on developing a specialized analysis algorithm that specifically recognizes the style of Raphael’s work.
“By conducting a thorough analysis of various artistic elements such as brushstrokes, color palette, and shadows, we were able to train the computer to identify Raphael’s style with remarkable accuracy,” said Hassan Ugil, a mathematician and computer scientist from the University of Bradford in the UK.
Ugil further explained, “The computer has the ability to see beyond what the human eye can perceive, delving into microscopic details.”
The process of training a machine learning algorithm typically requires a substantial amount of examples. However, this can be challenging when dealing with the work of a single artist. In this case, the research team adapted a pre-trained architecture called Resnet50, developed by Microsoft, and combined it with a traditional machine learning technique known as the support vector machine.
This modified method has previously demonstrated a 98% accuracy rate in identifying Raphael’s paintings. Typically, the algorithm is trained on whole paintings, but in this instance, the team instructed it to analyze specific parts of the artwork.
While the algorithm recognized Raphael’s touch in the faces of Madonna, the baby, and St. John, it did not attribute the same authorship to the face of St. Joseph. Researchers noted that the face of Joseph has historically been regarded as less skillfully executed compared to the other elements in the painting.
“When we subjected ‘Madonna della Rosa’ to the overall analysis, the results were inconclusive,” explained Ugil. “Therefore, we decided to analyze individual parts, and it became apparent that while the rest of the painting can be attributed to Raphael, it is highly likely that the face of Joseph was not painted by him,” Ugil added.
The study detailing this remarkable revelation has been published in the journal Heritage Science.