Professor Joris Dik from the Technical University Delft led an 18-month-long project that included a number of art historians, software developers, engineers, data analysts and scientists who were able to bring the work of Rembrandt, a 17th-century artist back to life, reports the International Business Times.
According to the Dutch News, a new portrait “by” Rembrandt was unveiled on Tuesday in Amsterdam. The painting called “The Next Rembrandt” is a computer-generated piece of artwork based on an analysis of all 346 of the master’s paintings in high-resolution 3D scans, along with the use of facial recognition software and algorithms.
Breaking the computer technique down to modern-day technology is not nearly as exciting as thinking about the different pigments Rembrandt used to make his colors or the kind of brush technique he used, but those things were taken into consideration as the 3D printing process evolved, layer by layer, laying down the colors and ever-so-slightly different tints and shadings.
The Next Rembrandt was built out of 170,000 separate parts of Rembrandt’s works and is made up of over 148 million pixels. The computer-masterpiece got mixed reviews, and perhaps, rightly so, because, after all, it wasn’t really painted by Rembrandt.
One art lover said, “I would expect more accent on the collar and the painting to be sharper.” And many people may be upset by the idea that a great artist could be replaced by an algorithm, but the original concept conceived by Bas Korsten, Executive Creative Director of advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, Amsterdam is just an exercise to find out what the culmination of every single piece of Rembrandt’s work would look like, says Newser.
The portrait, The Next Rembrandt is of a 17th-century man wearing a hat. The team secretly hopes he will be mistaken for a lost painting of the master. Korsten wants to assure the public they weren’t trying to make Rembrandt obsolete. “We are creating something new from his work,” Korsten says. “Only Rembrandt could create a Rembrandt.”
