Yahoo Finance One of the world’s most famous Rembrandt paintings restored by AI
Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ is back on display with missing parts temporarily restored in an exhibition aided by artificial intelligence.
Rembrandt finished the large canvas, which portrays the captain of an Amsterdam city militia ordering his men into action, in 1642.
Although it is now considered one of the greatest masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age, strips were cut from all four sides of the artwork during a move in 1715.
Though those strips have not been found, another artist of the time had made a copy which restorers and computer scientists have used to blend with Rembrandt’s style.
It has helped to recreate the missing parts in its original size.
“It's never the real thing, but I think it gives you different insight into the composition,” Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits said.
The central figure in the painting, Captain Frans Bannink Cocq, now appears more off-centre as he was in Rembrandt's original version, making the work more dynamic.
Some of the figure of a drummer entering the frame on the far right has been restored as he marches onto the scene, prompting a dog to bark.
Rijksmuseum senior scientist Robert Erdmann said the missing parts are hung to overlap the original work without touching it.
‘The Night Watch’ and the much smaller copy, which is attributed to Gerrit Lundens and dated to around 1655, had to be carefully photographed.
Then researchers scaled the images to the same size and warped the Lundens work to fit better with the Rembrandt where there were minor differences in placement of figures.
The artificial intelligence software learned by trying millions of times to copy Rembrandt's style and colours more closely.
Erdemann said the result was good enough because the AI had “hallucinated” cracks in the paint in some spots as it translated Lundens work into Rembrandt.
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