AI helps recreate the painting hidden under a Picasso masterpiece. The landscape has been discovered by applying X-ray images to Picasso’s painting .
The mysterious landscape lay beneath the visible surface of Pablo Picasso’s "La Miséreuse accroupie," or "The Crouching Beggar," a portrait of a destitute woman.
Tracks since 2018
In 2018, researchers already used an X-ray fluorescence imaging instrument to reveal a faint image of the covered scene. The X-ray image had uncovered a cloudy shadow from the paint. AI has been used to reconstruct the image in detail and color .
The recreation was made by Oxia Palus , an art collective that uses AI to uncover lost masterpieces. The Oxia Palus team used a combination of spectroscopic imaging, AI and 3D printing to update the visible trail of the landscape. They call the method ‘the neomastic process’.
They then used a 3D height map to apply layers of paint on the canvas in the style of Rusiñol. They say that the approach integrates the depth, thickness and approximate length of the artist’s brush strokes in the recreation .
Art historians suspect that it is a painting from a park near Barcelona by Santiago Rusiñol , Picasso’s friend and leader of the Catalan modernist movement. They believe that Picasso traced the hills in the landscape to shape the contours of the crouching woman’s back.