Museo Nacional del Prado
One of the faces portrayed in the Madonna della Rosa (Madonna of the Rose) was painted by an artist other than Raphael, according to new research.
The conclusion was the result of a study led by scientists from the Universities of Nottingham, Bradford and Stanford, who used artificial intelligence (AI) tools to determine that the face of Joseph in the 500-year-old artwork was not painted by the Renaissance master.
The team also confirmed that the rest of the painting is indeed the work of Raphael.
Hassan Ugail, director of the Centre for Visual Computing and Intelligent Systems at the University of Bradford, is the creator of the algorithm, which was trained using deep feature analysis to analyse 4,000 parameters such as brush strokes, colour palette and hue to determine whether a painting is a genuine Raphael.
The AI is said to be able to recognise genuine Raphael paintings with 98 per cent accuracy, according to the researcher.
“The computer sees far more deeply than the human eye, to microscopic level,” Ugail said. “Now we can say with great confidence whether a painting is an authentic Raphael or not.
“When we tested the della Rosa as a whole, the results were not conclusive. So then we tested the individual parts and, while the rest of the picture was confirmed as Raphael, Joseph’s face came up as most likely not Raphael.”
Raphael (1483-1520) is one of the world's most famous painters of the Renaissance period. The Italian is best known for works such as The School of Athens and Three Graces.
He was also identified as the painter of the Madonna della Rosa, which hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain. However, from the mid-1800s onwards, the art historian Johann David Passavant and others questioned this claim, and preferred to attribute its execution partially to Raphael and partially to his workshop.
The experiment has now shown that both sides of the debate are right: the majority of the painting was done by Raphael, with the exception of Joseph’s face, which could have been painted by a pupil in his workshop – possibly Giulio Romano or Gianfrancesco.
The discovery was celebrated as a demonstration of the potential uses of AI technologies in research fields related to the creative arts.
“This analysis of artworks by the artist Raphael presents an objective and quantifiable approach, using machine learning, to the classification of painted imagery,” said Dr Christopher Brooke, honorary research fellow at the University of Nottingham.
“It promises to be a useful, additional tool in future investigations of this nature, alongside well-established methods such as spectroscopy. It is adaptable in that works by other artists may be examined using the same technique, and this is the goal of future research.”
Ugail adds: “This is not a case of AI taking people’s jobs. The process of authenticating a work of art involves looking at many aspects, from its provenance and pigments to condition of the work and so on. However, this sort of software can be used as one tool to assist in the process.”
The research team has previously used this AI-assisted computer-based facial recognition to determine that a mystery painting known as the de Brécy Tondo was also the work of Raphael.
The team’s findings have been published in the Heritage Science journal.
