Does the Madonna need AI? Calling on AI authentication for a painting by Raphael. From the article:

Art historians have disagreed about whether Mr. Ayers’s find is a real Raphael. A new report commissioned by the owners from Art Recognition, a Zurich firm that uses machine learning to analyze artists’ brushstrokes, has found a 97% probability that the faces of Jesus and Mary in the work were painted by Raphael. An assistant may have completed the rest of the panel, as was common at the time.

Carina Popovici, the chief executive and founder of Art Recognition, is a former quantitative risk specialist for Credit Suisse with a doctorate in theoretical physics. She said that her team used algorithms to compare Mr. Ayers’s painting to more than 100 close-up digital images of proven Raphael works, as well as to fakes, in order to differentiate the artist’s particular way of handling a paintbrush. The firm’s AI software has been trained to recognize the styles of 300 artists this way, and fewer than 10% of its clients’ works produce a positive identification with higher than 95% probability. It recently concluded that a possible painting by Peter Paul Rubens in London’s National Gallery wasn’t his work. When the AI’s latest test pointed so firmly to Raphael, Ms. Popovici said, “We were shocked.”….

The rest of the art world still needs some convincing. Before any museum or major auction house will agree to show or sell Mr. Ayers’s painting, leading experts will need to take the AI’s findings seriously.

For a companion article, see here.