Researchers from the University of Nottingham and the University of Bradford have made a breakthrough in which facial recognition technology and AI have concluded that a painting bought by art collector George Lester Winward is a genuine Raphael. 

The mysterious 37-inch-long work had no known artist. Looking into the faces of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, Winward noticed an uncanny resemblance to the two figures at the centre of another painting: the Sistine Madonna, a 77-inch-long Renaissance masterpiece completed by Raphael around 1513. 

Shortly before he died in 1997, Winward set up the de Brécy Trust, donating hid paintings to the organization to allow researchers to continue rooting out their secrets. Scholars have been studying the de Brécy Tondo ever since.  

According to an expert on visual computing at Bradford who developed the AI facial recognition system used in the study, looking at the faces with the human eye shows an obvious similarity. Still, the computer can see far more deeply than we can to the pixel level in thousands of dimensions. 

The tool is an algorithm trained on millions of images, and it can quantify how similar one face is to another by comparing features and recognizing patterns. These features may be attributes such as shape, colors and textures which cannot be described visually or physically.  

The AI analysis is the latest in a series of discoveries made in the decades researchers have been studying painting.