Artificial intelligence analysis casts doubt on Van Eyck paintings in Italian and American museums | art

An analysis of two paintings in museums in the United States and Italy by the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck raised a profound question: What if van Eyck had not been?

Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, the name given to the nearly identical, unsigned paintings that hang in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Royal Museums of Turin, represent two of a small number of surviving works by one of the greatest masters of Western art, revered for his naturalistic portraits and religious themes.

The only problem is that neither version may actually be his own.

Scientific tests involving artificial intelligence on the paintings conducted by Art Recognition, a Swiss company collaborating on research with Tilburg University in the Netherlands, were unable to detect any of Van Eyck’s brushstrokes. It concluded that Philadelphia’s image was “91% negative” and Torino’s version was “86% negative”.

Van Eyck’s findings support scholars who have suggested that both versions were studio paintings — produced in the artist’s workshop but not necessarily by him, said Till Holger Borchert, one of Van Eyck’s leading scholars and director of the Swermond Ludwig Museum in Aachen.

He said that although he was “surprised” by the analysis, it raised more questions that needed to be explored.

Dr Karina Popovici, CEO of Art Recognition, said these high negative ratios for the paintings were particularly exciting. In contrast, an analysis of another van Eyck painting – the Arnolfini, which is among the most popular paintings in the National Gallery in London – said it was 89% likely to be original.

She said she was also surprised by the results: “I expected that if one panel was negative, the other would be positive. But no, both panels came back negative.”

“I think the Philadelphia and Turin museums will not be happy,” she told The Guardian. “It’s not good news about these paintings.” The Philadelphia and Turin Museums have been contacted for comment. Critics have asserted that the condition of the paintings and subsequent restorations may influence the AI-based brushstroke analysis.

Dr. Noah Charney, an art historian who discussed the initial findings of the Philadelphia painting on his podcast, described Art Recognition’s previous analyzes as “remarkably accurate” and said the negative result for both images was so surprising that deeper testing was done to confirm the findings.

He said he had expected the Turin portrait to be confirmed by van Eyck, and the Philadelphia version to appear as a copy, either from the artist’s workshop or later.

“The negative results indicate that both images are studio works, which would mean that we have a lost original that was more completely in Van Eyck’s hand than these two images,” he said.

“If a work comes out of van Eyck’s studio, that doesn’t necessarily mean he actually painted the surface level of all its aspects,” he said on his podcast. “This is a misconception that people acquire from the 19th-century idea of ​​the lone artist in an attic in Paris drinking absinthe, smoking cigarettes, wearing a hat, and doing every aspect of the work himself.”

Van Eyck is considered one of the pioneers of oil painting. “[Van Eyck] “He didn’t invent oil painting, but he perfected it so completely that everyone seemed to be working in his shadow for centuries,” Charney said. “His surfaces shimmer with light in detail so minute that you need a magnifying glass to take it all in. Every stone, hair, reflection and sparkle seems to be rendered with a kind of supernatural clarity.

“This ability to make the everyday illuminating is why many consider him not only a great painter, but one of the great observers of reality in all of Western art. However, for all his fame, van Eyck’s surviving oeuvre is small: fewer than 20 paintings are universally accepted as having been painted by his hand.”

The National Gallery in London is preparing to hold an exhibition of Van Eyck’s photographs in November.

Among previous analyses, Art Recognition detected as many as 40 fake paintings offered on eBay in 2024. It also concluded in 2021 that Rubens’s Samson and Delilah in the National Gallery was “91% negative”, supporting critics who have long doubted that the painting was by the 17th-century Flemish artist.