{"id":131335,"date":"2021-11-27T08:27:32","date_gmt":"2021-11-27T16:27:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/can-ai-truly-give-us-a-glimpse-of-lost-masterpieces"},"modified":"2021-11-27T08:27:32","modified_gmt":"2021-11-27T16:27:32","slug":"can-ai-truly-give-us-a-glimpse-of-lost-masterpieces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/can-ai-truly-give-us-a-glimpse-of-lost-masterpieces","title":{"rendered":"Can AI Truly Give Us a Glimpse of Lost Masterpieces?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/can-ai-truly-give-us-a-glimpse-of-lost-masterpieces2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Recent projects used machine learning to resurrect paintings by Klimt and Rembrandt. They raise questions about what computers can understand about art.<\/p>\n<p>Full Story:<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>IN 1945, FIRE claimed three of Gustav Klimt\u2019s most controversial paintings. Commissioned in 1,894 for the University of Vienna, \u201cthe Faculty Paintings\u201d\u2014as they became known\u2014were unlike any of the Austrian symbolist\u2019s previous work. As soon as he presented them, critics were in an uproar over their dramatic departure from the aesthetics of the time. Professors at the university rejected them immediately, and Klimt withdrew from the project. Soon thereafter, the works found their way into other collections. During World War II, they were placed in a castle north of Vienna for safekeeping, but the castle burned down, and the paintings presumably went with it. All that remains today are some black-and-white photographs and writings from the time. Yet I am staring right at them.<\/p>\n<p>Well, not the paintings themselves. Franz Smola, a Klimt expert, and Emil Wallner, a machine learning researcher, spent six months combining their expertise to revive Klimt\u2019s lost work. It\u2019s been a laborious process, one that started with those black-and-white photos and then incorporated artificial intelligence and scores of intel about the painter\u2019s art, in an attempt to recreate what those lost paintings might have looked like. The results are what Smola and Wallner are showing me\u2014and even they are taken aback by the captivating technicolor images the AI produced.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s make one thing clear: No one is saying this AI is bringing back Klimt\u2019s original works. \u201cIt\u2019s not a process of recreating the actual colors, it is re-colorizing the photographs,\u201d Smola is quick to note. \u201cThe medium of photography is already an abstraction from the real works.\u201d What machine learning is doing is providing a glimpse of something that was believed to be lost for decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recent projects used machine learning to resurrect paintings by Klimt and Rembrandt. They raise questions about what computers can understand about art. Full Story: IN 1945, FIRE claimed three of Gustav Klimt\u2019s most controversial paintings. Commissioned in 1,894 for the University of Vienna, \u201cthe Faculty Paintings\u201d\u2014as they became known\u2014were unlike any of the Austrian symbolist\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-arts","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}