Artificial intelligence made it possible to decide.

The Brécy Tondo

, acquired by a British collector in 1981, is indeed a work by Raphaël.

After 40 years of research, a facial recognition tool has attributed this painting to the famous Italian painter of the Renaissance, reports

BFM Tech

.


When George Lester Winward bought this painting, which was unsigned and had no author, he was convinced that it was a work by Raphael, who lived in the same century as the illustrious Michel- Angel and Leonardo da Vinci.

Why ?

He spotted many similarities between the painting he had just bought and

The Sistine Madonna

, the famous religious painting by the Italian artist.


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

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A similarity of 97%

But the collector never had confirmation of his expertise.

Shortly before his death, he bequeathed the painting to an association so that researchers could continue to examine the work and find its author, says the Smithsonian Magazine.

Researchers from the British universities of Nottingham and Bradford then decided to use a facial recognition tool to compare the painting to

 Raphael's

Sistine Madonna .


"Looking at the faces with the human eye, there is an obvious similarity, but the computer can see much deeper than us, in thousands of dimensions, at the pixel level", explains Professor Hassan Ugail who participated in the study, the conclusions of which will be released shortly.

Thus, by comparing the two paintings, the Madonnas represented there are 97% similar.

For children, the similarity reaches 86%.

Knowing that a resemblance of 75% is enough to validate the attribution of the work.



If artificial intelligence made it possible to confirm the convictions of George Lester Winward and to find the author of this painting 40 years after its purchase, nothing indicates that this will be sufficient to obtain a certificate of authenticity, underlines

BFM

.

The conclusions of the British researchers obtained through facial recognition may not be enough.

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  • Culture

  • Painting

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Unusual