If AI Is Right, a New Raphael Painting Has Been Found

A cabinetmaker from Chicago was on vacation in England in 1995 when he spotted a painting tucked behind an armoire in an antiques shop. Anthony Ayers, an amateur artist, couldn't afford the $30,000 painting, which the shop owner suggested was from the Renaissance, but he also couldn't get it out of his head, as the Wall Street Journal reports. After enlisting friends to help buy it, he became convinced it was a lost masterpiece by the illustrious Raphael, who left behind fewer than 200 works, and invested some $500,000 in proving he was right. He failed nonetheless. And yet, months after Ayers' death comes what may be the strongest case yet for his assertion—by way of artificial intelligence.

The painting's owners, now made up of a pool of investors, commissioned art authentication company Art Recognition of Zurich to turn its AI system on Raphael's authenticated paintings and some fakes in an effort to key in on the artist's style. Applying its dataset to Ayers' Flaget Madonna—depicting the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ alongside John the Baptist and his mother, Elizabeth—it found the figures of Madonna and Jesus were 96% attributable to Raphael, while the rest of the painting was likely completed by an assistant in his studio, as was common. "We were shocked," Art Recognition founder Carina Popovici tells the Journal, which reports "fewer than 10% of its clients' works produce a positive identification with higher than 95% probability."

This meshes with the findings of Art Analysis and Research, a company that spent four years probing the work and concluded that it was likely (though not definitively) a Raphael based partly on the use of orpiment, a pigment used by only "a very select group of Renaissance painters, including Raphael," per Artnet. And the story isn't so strange: Ayers determined the painting was likely gifted by the Vatican to the French-born Bishop Joseph Flaget, who donated it to a convent he founded in Kentucky. The convent sold it in the 1980s to an American dealer, from which it reached the antiques shop. However, a conservator who's worked on the painting says the AI review is "not a smoking gun," per the Journal, as human experts are not in agreement. (More Raphael stories.)