Artificial intelligence has been used to help art restorers recreate the missing edges of a Rembrandt painting that was trimmed more than 300 years ago.
The Night Watch, which was painted by the Dutch master in 1642, was cropped 70 years later.
The group portrait of members of a local militia originally hung in their clubhouse but was cut to size when it was moved so that it could fit in the space between two doors in Amsterdam’s town hall.
Researchers and art historians knew that the original painting was bigger thanks in part to a smaller copy rendered at the same time.
A team of restorers spent nearly two years going over the painting with an array of high-tech gear, including scanners, x-rays and digital cameras.
They used a combination of the huge amounts of data collected with the small copy, attributed to fellow Dutch artist Gerrit Lundens, to work out what should go in the missing strips.
Taco Dibbits, museum director at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, which plays host to the painting, said that they used the digital technology to create an incredibly detailed image of the painting.
AI was trained to paint in the style of Rembrandt
They then used a neural network to teach the AI to paint like the master, with details such as “what colour Rembrandt used in the Night Watch” and “what his brush strokes looked like”.
The AI also allowed restorers to fix distortions in perspective that existed in the copy due to the fact that Lundens sat to one side as he copied the Rembrandt original.
Dibbits conceded that Rembrandt would have done it “more beautifully”, but said that the AI “comes very close”.
The restoration also showed the painting in a different light from the version that has been widely known for the past three centuries.
The strip on the left of the painting brings in two men and a boy and shifts the focal point of the scene’s main characters away from the centre.
The pixel-by-pixel digital restoration also completed a helmet on the left of the painting and gave a clearer view of a boy in the left foreground who is captured running away from the militia.
The digital images have been printed and placed around the surviving bulk of the original so that visitors can see the whole work as it was intended.
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