Geoglyphs, paintings… How does artificial intelligence make it possible to discover artistic details unknown to the past?

Artificial intelligence allows us to better “see” artistic works of the past. Two fascinating discoveries have been made recently through the use of algorithms.

Artificial intelligence has made it possible to make details hitherto ignored in Renaissance paintings visible to our human eyes, and even to discover 300 giant drawings, traced on the ground in a desert in southern Peru, while they were had never been identified until now.

For Renaissance paintings, Italian scientists, whose work was published Monday September 23 in the journal Pnas, managed to discover in two paintings by the painter Raphaël, dating from the 16th century, the detail of the chemical composition of the paints and the pigments used, the superposition of brushstrokes which made it possible in particular to create the effects of sfumato or chiaroscuro. They even spotted traces of restoration carried out two centuries later in these works. All this thanks to the use of “X-ray fluorescence spectrometry” combined with artificial intelligence.

It is a technique, already used for several decades, which makes it possible, by bombarding the surface of a painting with X-rays, to identify the atoms present on the canvas. The novelty here is that by combining this system for analyzing the chemistry of a table, with artificial intelligence, the computing power of AI, makes it possible to draw new conclusions from the enormous mass of data obtained on atoms using X-rays. This is a discovery which should make it possible to better restore the tables in the future.

This is another use of AI that helped a Japanese team locate 303 geoglyphs in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. Their work was also published Monday September 23 in the journal PNAS. Geoglyphs are giant drawings, almost 2000 years old, which represent geometric figures or silhouettes of animals and which can only be seen from the sky.

So far, 430 geoglyphs have already been identified in the space of a century by analyzing aerial images with the naked eye. But this time, by combining aerial images and artificial intelligence, this Japanese team managed to discover 303 new giant drawings in the space of six months. This shows how AI can also help archaeologists. This work was published in the very prestigious journal of the American National Academy of Sciences.