In West Yorkshire, Bradford hosts a display of a Madonna and child artwork with a snazzy new provenance. Using artificial intelligence (A.I.) facial recognition technology, academics from the Universities of Nottingham and Bradford concluded that the piece was created by the Italian Renaissance master Raphael.
The de Brécy Tondo, as the painting is commonly referred to, will be on show at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery for the first time ever during this two-month exhibition. It was acquired in 1981 during a country-house sale in England by the late British art collector George Lester Winward, who had long believed it to be a Raphael. Hence, the collection is known as the de Brécy Trust Collection.
“Testing the Tondo using this new A.I. model has shown startling results, confirming it is most likely by Raphael,” Hassan Ugail, director of the center of visual computing at the University of Nottingham, told the BBC. “Together with my previous work using facial recognition, and combined with previous research by my fellow academics, we have concluded the Tondo and the Sistine Madonna are undoubtedly by the same artist.”
Specifically, the two putti (baby angels) below Mary in the circle painting are reminiscent of those in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1512-13), an altarpiece in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister at the Dresden State Art Museums.
But specialists had already concluded that the sculpture was a Victorian-era copy of the more well-known masterwork, and not everyone is convinced by A.I. findings that imply otherwise.
The team behind the study is certain its findings vindicate Raphael’s authorship.
The artificial intelligence discovered a 97% similarity between the two Madonnas and an 87% similarity between the two infant Jesuses. If the likelihood that two things are the same is more than 75%, then we may confidently say that they are identical.
The use of A.I. isn’t the only piece of evidence pointing to Raphael as the artist. The De Brécy Trust, which Winward established in 1995, two years before his death, analyzed the tondo’s pigments and discovered that they were consistent with those used in Renaissance paintings.
Image courtesy: Raphael, Sistine Madonna (1512–13). Collection of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister at the Dresden State Art Museums.
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