AI spots never-before-seen secret detail hidden in 500-year-old painting by Raphael

With the rise of generative AI such as ChatGPT and its competitors developed by other tech giants, the integration of AI into everyday human life has been accelerated in the past couple of years. Apart from writing codes and creating digital art, AI is also being used to decode hidden messages and details in ancient artifacts to travel back in time. Raphael, who was a renowned Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance era and painted the famous "The School of Athens," had created yet another intriguing piece of art with secrets hidden in the details. But the mystery of the painting has finally been solved thanks to an AI neural network.

According to a study published in Heritage Science, the masterpiece in discussion is titled "Madonna della Rosa" or "Madonna of the Rose." The oil painting consisted of images of Saint Joseph, a young John the Baptist, Mary of Nazareth, and Jesus Christ. However, the study conducted with the help of AI on the painting deduced that the face of Saint Joseph on the top left side of the picture was not originally painted by Raphael. This particular painting has been a topic of heated discussion among scholars for ages, but AI scanned patterns to reveal that the entire painting was not completed solely by Raphael.

"Using deep feature analysis, we used pictures of authenticated Raphael paintings to train the computer to recognize his style to a very detailed degree, from the brushstrokes, the color palette, the shading and every aspect of the work," mathematician and computer scientist Hassan Ugail from the University of Bradford in the UK, told the outlet. "The computer sees far more deeply than the human eye, to the microscopic level," he added. To study the painting in depth, a team of experts reworked a ResNet50, which was a pre-trained learning model developed by Microsoft, and used it with a traditional machine learning technique called Support Vector Machine.

This learning model has previously been 90% accurate while identifying previous paintings made by the Italian artist. The experts trained the model to study individual faces that appear in Madonna della Rossa. The AI model deduced that the images of Madonna, John the Baptist, and Jesus Christ were painted by Raphael himself but Saint Joseph's figure was added later by an unknown painter. "When we tested the della Rosa as a whole, the results were not conclusive," Ugail revealed in the study. "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."

It is suspected that Giulio Romano, who was one of Raphael's pupils, was possibly responsible for painting Saint Joseph's face. The "Madonna della Rossa" is believed to have been painted between the years 1518 and 1520. However, art historians in the mid-1800s started wondering if Raphael had created all his paintings on his own or not.

Since art critics and historians had no access to modern technology back then, the question about Raphael's art and legitimacy remained intact. It is believed that AI learning models will allow modern art experts to study various art pieces. But Ugail clarifies, "This is not a case of AI taking people's jobs," and adds, "The process of authenticating a work of art involves looking at many aspects, from its provenance, pigments, condition of the work and so on. However, this sort of software can be used as one tool to assist in the process."