SPOTTING forged paintings could become easier thanks to a new digital technique that can identify whether two works of art are by the same artist. It can even tell you if an artist used talented students to help out with the painting.
While most forensic work requires a paint sample, the scientists behind the new technique do not even have to touch the masterpiece. 鈥淲e just walk around with a nice camera and take photos,鈥� says Hany Farid of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. A computer program then looks for statistical patterns in the digital image, based on the pressure, orientation or length of the brush stroke and the evenness of the paint.
When these characteristics are plotted in three-dimensions, the paintings of one artist will lie in a tight cluster of 鈥渟ignature鈥� coordinates, while the oeuvre of another artist will cluster elsewhere on the plot. Comparing a suspected forgery with a genuine painting can help identify it as authentic or fake.
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Farid and his colleagues digitally analysed the Italian painter Pietro Perugino鈥檚 Madonna with Child, painted around 1500. Many experts believe that Perugino鈥檚 students, which included Raphael, contributed to the painting. The computer analysis shows that three of the six heads in the painting were probably the work of one artist, maybe Perugino himself, while the other heads were painted by three different people (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073_pnas.0406398101).
