SOFTWARE SPOTS A MASTERPIECE

No, this doesn’t have a damn thing to do with killer drones, pain rays, or mul­lahs with nukes. But I’m post­ing this Wired News story of mine any­way, dammit. It’s about soft­ware tools that may be able to spot the dif­fer­ence between a real paint­ing, and a slick forgery.

Scholars have had their sus­pi­cions that the paint­ing of Madonna and child cred­ited to the Italian Renaissance mas­ter Pietro Perugino wasn’t really done by him alone. But they could never be sure.
Now, a new set of soft­ware tools, devel­oped by a Dartmouth College team, seems to con­firm the art his­to­ri­ans’ doubts, show­ing evi­dence of at least four dif­fer­ent painters work­ing on the can­vas. The pro­grams’ mak­ers hope this will be the first in a long line of art authen­ti­ca­tion mys­ter­ies they can help put to rest, with code that can sort out real from fake.
“There are prop­er­ties in an artist’s pen and brush strokes that aren’t vis­i­ble to the human eye, but that are there nonethe­less. And we can find them, through math­e­mat­i­cal, sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis,” said Dartmouth com­puter sci­ence pro­fes­sor Hany Farid, who devel­oped the algo­rithms, along with math pro­fes­sor Daniel Rockmore and grad­u­ate stu­dent Siwei Lyu.
But museum cura­tors and sta­tis­ti­cians cau­tion that the Dartmouth group’s tech­niques have only begun to be tested. Using algo­rithms to back up schol­ars’ sus­pi­cions is one thing; uncov­er­ing a fraud with just a com­puter, that’s com­pletely dif­fer­ent. And in the art world, no sci­en­tific method is con­sid­ered as sure as the eye of a sea­soned con­nois­seur.
“This is very unusual,” said Nadine Orenstein, the cura­tor of the draw­ings and prints depart­ment at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “We’re all a bit skeptical.”

THERE’S MORE: Earlier this year, Farid made noise when he unveiled his soft­ware for find­ing faked dig­i­tal images. My New York Times story on that work is here.

November 22nd, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.