Written by Gareth Harris, published on March 11, 2024 on TheArtNewspaper.com.
A Swiss company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to authenticate Old Master paintings says that a portrait of a peasant woman is likely to have been made by one of the greatest artists of the German Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer. The latest claim fuels the debate about whether AI can replace the human eye and expertise in assessing a picture’s authorship.
Carina Popovici, the chief executive of Zurich-based Art Recognition, presented her investigation into the piece, Vna Vilana Windisch (1505), at the Art Business conference at Tefaf Maastricht (8 March). The work comes from a private European collection.
Popovici said during her presentation: “We trained the AI on Dürer using a dataset comprising 144 images of genuine artworks executed in black and brown ink, as well as chalk and charcoal. The AI was also fed a roughly equal number of negative examples (images of imitations, forgeries, pieces produced by followers, and images in the style of Dürer produced by a genAI). After the training, we conducted a detailed analysis of Vna Vilana Windisch. The AI determined the piece’s authenticity to be around 82%.”