A painting by Raphaël identified 40 years later thanks to artificial intelligence

Romain Rouillard 7:51 p.m., February 01, 2023

George Lester Winward was right.

In 1981, this art collector acquired a painting presenting the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus in the center of the canvas and for which no author is identified.

But one detail - and not the least - catches his attention: the facial features of the two characters display a disturbing resemblance to those depicted in

, a famous painting by the Italian painter Raphael, completed around 1513. The British collector is then convinced of having found a masterpiece by one of the artistic figures of the Renaissance.

A story unveiled by the 

 and spotted by BFMTV. 

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Shortly before his death in 1997 and without having been able to penetrate the mystery of this painting, George Lester Winward decided to entrust it to researchers who would finally succeed in lifting the veil surrounding this work.

A handful of them, members of the universities of Nottingham and Bradford, decide to use artificial intelligence to clearly identify the painting.

The two faces of the Madonna are 97% similar

Thanks to a facial recognition tool, the researchers manage to carefully compare the two tables.

And their conclusions suffer from no ambiguity: the painting purchased by the collector is "very likely to be a masterpiece by Raphael" according to them.

This artificial intelligence, capable of quantifying the resemblance of two faces, revealed that the two representations of the Virgin Mary were 97% similar.

Those of the child Jesus are 86%. 

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

According to Hassan Ugail, an expert in visual computing at the University of Bradford, two faces are considered identical when their similarity rate exceeds 75%.

“Looking at faces with the human eye shows an obvious similarity, but the computer can see much deeper than us, into thousands of pixel-level dimensions,” adds the expert.

Researchers must now obtain a certificate of authenticity to definitively validate the conclusions of their findings.

And thus confirm the first intuition of George Lester Winward, more than 40 years ago.