The Long-Lost Pieces of Rembrandt’s Night Watch Get Reconstructed with Artificial Intelligence

in Art, History, Technology | June 25th, 2021

Most of us know Rembrandt’s masterpiece by the name The Night Watch, but it has a longer original title: Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. By the same token, the version of the painting we’ve all seen — whatever we happen to call it — is smaller than the one Rembrandt originally painted in 1642. “In 1715, the monumental canvas was cut down on all four sides to fit onto a wall between two doors in Amsterdam’s Town Hall,” writes The New York Times‘ Nina Siegal. “The snipped pieces were lost. Since the 19th century, the trimmed painting has been housed in the Rijksmuseum, where it is displayed as the museum’s centerpiece, at the focal point of its Gallery of Honor.”

In recent years, the Rijksmuseum has honored The Night Watch further with a thoroughgoing restoration called Operation Night Watch. This ambitious undertaking has so far produced attractions like the largest and most detailed photograph of the painting ever taken, zoom-in-able to the individual brushstroke.

That phase required high imaging technology, to be sure, but it may appear downright conventional compared to the just-unveiled recreation of the work’s three-centuries-missing pieces, which will hang on all four sides of the original at the Rijksmuseum for the next three months. This making-whole wouldn’t have been possible without a small copy made in the 17th century — or the latest artificial-intelligence technology of the 21st.

Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum

“Rather than hiring a painter to reconstruct the missing pieces, the museum’s senior scientist, Robert Erdmann, trained a computer to recreate them pixel by pixel in Rembrandt’s style,” writes Siegal. Erdmann used “a relatively new technology known as convolutional neural networks, a class of artificial-intelligence algorithms designed to help computers make sense of images.” The process, explained in more detail by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei at ARTNews, involved digitally “splitting up the painting into thousands of tiles and placing matching tiles from both the original and the copy side-by-side,” training multiple neural networks to complete the painting in a style as close as possible to Rembrandt’s rather than the copyist’s. The result, with a few new faces as well as a startlingly different compositional feel than the Night Watch we’ve all seen, would no doubt please Captain Banninck Cocq and his militiamen: this, after all, is the portrait they paid for.

You can watch videos on this Rijksmuseum page showing how the classic painting was restored.

The Restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Begins: Watch the Painstaking Process On-Site and Online

The Largest & Most Detailed Photograph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Is Now Online: Zoom In & See Every Brush Stroke

All the Rembrandts: The Rijksmuseum Puts All 400 Rembrandts It Owns on Display for the First Time

Watch an Art Conservator Bring Classic Paintings Back to Life in Intriguingly Narrated Videos

AI & X-Rays Recover Lost Artworks Underneath Paintings by Picasso & Modigliani

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The Artistic & Mystical World of Tarot: See Decks by Salvador Dalí, Aleister Crowley, H.R. Giger & More

in Art, Games, History | June 24th, 2021

The tarot goes back to Italy of the late Middle Ages. Every day here in the 21st century, I see undeniable signs of its cultural and temporal transcendence: specifically, the tarot shops doing business here and there along the streets of Seoul, where I live. The tarot began as a deck for play, but these aren’t dealers in card-gaming supplies; rather, their proprietors use tarot decks to provide customers suggestions about their destiny and advice on what to do in the future. Over the past five or six centuries, the purpose of the tarot many have changed, but its original artistic sensibility — dramatic, symbol-laden, and highly subject to counterintuitive interpretation — has remained intact.

You can get an idea of that original artistic sensibility by taking a look at the the Sola-Busca, the oldest known complete deck of tarot cards. Dating from the 1490s, it holds obvious historical interest, but it’s hardly the only tarot deck we’ve featured here on Open Culture.

Artists of subsequent eras, up to and including our own, have created special decks in accordance with their distinctive visions. The unstoppable surrealist Salvador Dalí designed his own, a project embarked upon at the behest of James Bond film producer Albert Broccoli. Later, the master of biomechanism H.R. Giger received a tarot commission as well; though his deck uses previously unpublished rather than custom-made art, it all looks surprisingly, sometimes chillingly fitting.

The world’s most popular tarot deck was designed not by a famous artist, but by an illustrator named Pamela Coleman-Smith. Many more have used and appreciated her work than even, say, the Thoth deck, designed by no less renowned an occultist than Aleister Crowley, “the wickedest man in the world.” If you won’t take his word for it, perhaps the founder of analytical psychology can sell you on the merits of tarot: for Carl Jung, the deck held out the possibility of the “intuitive method” he sought for “understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment.” (See his deck here.) Even if you’re not in search of such a method, few other artifacts weave together so many threads of art, philosophy, history, and symbolism. Of course, no few modern enthusiasts find in it the same appeal as did those early tarot players of the 15th century: it’s fun.

Salvador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Surrealism in a Classic Tarot Card Deck

The Thoth Tarot Deck Designed by Famed Occultist Aleister Crowley

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Journey into the Occult

Behold the Sola-Busca Tarot Deck, the Earliest Complete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

Divine Decks: A Visual History of Tarot: The First Comprehensive Survey of Tarot Gets Published by Taschen

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

1540 Monet Paintings in a Two Hour Video

in Art | June 24th, 2021

I am distressed, almost discouraged, and fatigued to the point of feeling slightly ill. What I am doing is no good, and in spite of your confidence I am very much afraid that my efforts will all lead to nothing.

To know anything about the school of painting called Impressionism, one must know Claude Monet, who gave the movement its name with his painting Impression, Sunrise and provided its method — an almost confrontational relationship with landscape in plein-air. “I have gone back to some things that can’t possibly be done: water, with weeds waving at the bottom,” Monet wrote in a letter to his friend Gustave Geffroy in 1890. “It is a wonderful sight, but it drives one crazy trying to paint it. But that is the kind of thing I am always tackling.”

That “kind of thing,” the compulsion to paint nature in motion, required working quickly, repeating the same experiments over and over, despairing of getting it right, producing in the attempt his glorious series of haystacks and water lilies. Monet began painting landscapes upon meeting artist Eugene Boudin, who taught him to paint in open air, and he never stopped, refining his brushstroke for almost seventy years: from his first canvas, 1858’s View from the banks of the Lezade, to his last, The Rose Bush, finished in 1926, the final year of his life.

Whatever else Impressionism might mean, when it comes to Monet, it entails a prodigious amount of drawing, sketching, and painting. Over 2,500 such works have been attributed to him. That number is probably much higher “as it is known that Monet destroyed a number of his own works and others have surely been lost over time,” notes the Monet Gallery. Around 2,000 of those works are paintings, now spread around the world, with the largest collection located at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris, where Impression, Sunrise (above) is held.

While it may be nearly impossible to see all of Monet’s known works in one lifetime (just as it seems impossible that he could have made so many masterpieces in one life), you can see 1540 of them in the video at the top — in a presentation that may or may not suit your art viewing sensibilities. If zooming slowly into hundreds of Monet paintings for a few seconds leaves you feeling a little overwhelmed, you can also head to the Monet Gallery online to see over 1900 of the artist’s attempts at “following Nature,” as he put it, “without being able to grasp her.”

Claude Monet at Work in His Famous Garden at Giverny: Rare Film from 1915

How to Paint Water Lilies Like Monet in 14 Minutes

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art–and We Do It Anyway (1998)

in Art, Music, Television | June 22nd, 2021

Art is useless, Oscar Wilde declared. Yet faced with, say, a painting by Kandinsky, film by Malick, or great work by David Bowie, we may feel it “impossible to escape the impression,” as Sigmund Freud wrote, “that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.” However ambiguously, art can move us beyond the selfish boundaries of the ego to connect with intangibles beyond ideas of use and uselessness.

That experience of connectedness, what Freud called the “oceanic,” stimulated by a work of art can mirror the sublime feelings awakened by nature. “A work of art is useless as a flower is useless,” Wilde clarified in a letter to a perplexed reader. “A flower blooms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers.” It’s an imperfect analogy. The flower serves quite another purpose for the bee, and for the plant. “All of this is I fear very obscure,” Wilde admits.

The point being, from the point of view of bare survival, art makes no sense. “It’s a loony kind of thing to want to do,” says Bowie himself, in the interview clip above from a 1998 appearance on The Charlie Rose Show. “I think the saner and rational approach to life is to survive steadfastly and create a protective home and create a warm loving environment for one’s family and get food for them. That’s about it. Anything else is extra. All culture is extra…. It’s unnecessary and it’s a sign of the irrational part of man. We should just be content with picking nuts.”

My fav Bowie clip ever is him talking about how the Art establishment co-opts particular voices out of a fertile art movement to kill off that movement by creating singular voices to perpetuate the idea of Art as rare commodity by geniuses rather than something within all people pic.twitter.com/CXBzYBN6cR
— RAMZEE (@RamzeeRawkz) February 28, 2021

Why are we not content with picking nuts? Perhaps most of us are. Perhaps “being an artist,” Bowie wonders “is a sign of a certain kind of dysfunction, of social dysfunctionalism anyway. It’s an extraordinary thing to do, to express yourself in such… in such rarified terms.” It’s a Wildean observation, but one Bowie does not make to stigmatize individuals. As Rose remarks, he has “always resisted the idea that this creativity that you have comes from any form of dysfunction or… madness.” Perhaps instead it is the market that is dysfunctional, Bowie suggests in a 1996 interview, just above, with Rose and Julian Schnabel.

Art may serve no practical purpose in an ordinary sense, but it is not only the provenance of singular geniuses. “Once it falls into the hands of the proletariat,” says Bowie, “that the ability to make art is inherent in all of us, that demolishes the idea of art and commerce, and that’s no good for business.” Wilde also saw art and commerce in fundamental tension. “Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him,” he wrote. “But this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse,” an artificial elevation and enclosure, says Bowie, of expressions that belong to everyone.

When David Bowie Launched His Own Internet Service Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

David Bowie Songs Reimagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers: Space Oddity, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

AI & X-Rays Recover Lost Artworks Underneath Paintings by Picasso & Modigliani

in Art, Technology | June 22nd, 2021

You see above a painting by Amedeo Modigliani, a portrait of the artist’s lover Beatrice Hastings, unseen by the public until its rediscovery just this year. Or at any rate, some see that: in another sense, the image is a new or almost-new artistic creation, based on X-rays of Modigliani’s Portrait of a Girl. Underneath the paint that makes up that celebrated work lie traces enough to establish the presence of a different, earlier one beneath. But only now, after the employment of neural networks fed with enough of the artist’s acknowledged work to recognize and replicate his signature style, do we have a sense of what it could have looked like.

“Anthony Bourached and George Cann, both PhD candidates, are heading the ‘NeoMasters’ project through a company called Oxia Palus,” writes The Guardian‘s Dalya Alberge. “They have ambitious plans to rediscover further hidden paintings on canvases that were reused by artists, who were perhaps too impoverished to buy supplies or dissatisfied with initial compositions.”

Modigliani was certainly impecunious enough to have done so more than once, and his relationship with Hastings — a long affair that was volatile even by the standards of the early 20th-century Parisian bohemia they inhabited — did provide material for other portraits.

Specialists, respectively, in neuroscience and the surface of Mars (their company’s name refers to a region of that planet), Bourached and Cann have proven enterprising in this art-oriented endeavor. “A 3D-printed physical rendering of their creation, complete with computer-simulated ‘brushstrokes’ and texture, will soon go on display at London’s Lebenson Gallery as part of the duo’s ‘NeoMasters’ project,” writes Nora McGreevy at Smithsonian.com. Earlier this year, McGreevy also covered Oxia Palus’ digitally assisted recovery of a Barcelona landscape possibly painted by the Spanish poet, playwright, and artist Santiago Rusiñol — before it was painted over by Pablo Picasso.

This discovery actually goes back to 1992, when conservators first determined the existence of another image beneath Picasso’s little-known La Miséreuse accroupie, or The Crouching Beggar. “Researchers suspect that Picasso used the mountains in Rusiñol’s landscape to shape the contours of his female subject’s back,” writes McGreevy. “A 2018 X-ray of that lesser-known work by the Art Gallery of Toronto provided Oxia Palus what they needed to start work on their A.I.-assisted recreation. Not only did Bourached and Cann 3D print 100 physical copies of the final product, they linked each one to a unique non-fungible token (NFT), the new kind of digital artifact that has become something of a craze in the art world — surely an unimaginable afterlife for these images Modigliani and Picasso must have assumed they’d obliterated for good.

via Hyperallergic

Scientists Create a New Rembrandt Painting, Using a 3D Printer & Data Analysis of Rembrandt’s Body of Work

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recovery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Computer Art

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Painting?: An Explanation in 15 Minutes

in Art, History | June 17th, 2021

The Mona Lisa may be on display at the Louvre, but best of luck appreciating it there. The first obstacle, quite literally, is the crowd that’s always massed around it (or, in the time before social-distancing policies, was always massed around it). Even if you maneuver your way to the front of the camera-phoned throng, the painting itself hangs within a thick glass case — can’t have a repeat of the 1911 theft — and has dimensions in any event much smaller than people tend to imagine. After all, we come to know Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting through cultural reference and parody, but also through large-scale reproduction, the better to understand the painstaking and innovative artistic labor that makes the Mona Lisa worth flocking to in the first place.

Still, there are those who come away from the Mona Lisa — assuming they can manage to get back out through the mass of humanity — wondering what all the fuss is about. It was for them, presumably, that curator James Payne chose that painting as the first subject of his Youtube series Great Art Explained.

As he would in his subsequent episodes (such as his three-part series, previously featured here on Open Culture, about Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights), Payne casts off the accumulated historical speculation and other various forms of cultural baggage to find the work’s artistic core. In the case of the Mona Lisa, not just “the greatest psychological portrait ever painted” but “the end product of the greatest inquisitive mind in history,” that still leaves much to discuss.

In under fifteen minutes, Payne explains a host of the techniques Leonardo employed in painting the Mona Lisa that no artist of his time and place had used before — and indeed, that in some cases no other artists mastered until long thereafter. These include working on top of an under-layer of white paint that appears to be “lighting Mona Lisa from within,” stripping his subject of “all the usual high-status symbols” usually seen in aristocratic portraiture, depicting her at three-quarters length rather than in full frame, making the background fade into the distance while also suggesting motion, and combining the techniques of low-contrast sfumato and high-contrast chiaroscuro. And only a painter with Leonardo’s anatomical knowledge could have executed that famously subtle smile, which appears and vanishes again depending on which part of the Mona Lisa we look at — no matter whether we’re doing it at the Louvre or on Youtube.

Did Leonardo da Vinci Paint a First Mona Lisa Before The Mona Lisa?

Original Portrait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Layers of da Vinci’s Masterpiece

When Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire Were Accused of Stealing the Mona Lisa (1911)

Mark Twain Skewers Great Works of Art: The Mona Lisa (“a Smoked Haddock!”), The Last Supper (“a Mournful Wreck”) & More

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Introductions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picasso & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Download Great Works of Art from 40+ Museums Worldwide: Explore Artvee, the New Art Search Engine

in Art, Technology | June 16th, 2021

Dilbert creator Scott Adams once wrote of his early experiences introducing the World Wide Web to others. “In 1993, there were only a handful of Web sites you could access, such as the Smithsonian’s exhibit of gems. Those pages were slow to load and crashed as often as they worked.” But those who witnessed this technology in action would invariably “get out of their chairs their eyes like saucers, and they would approach the keyboard. They had to touch it themselves. There was something about the internet that was like catnip.” In the intervening decades, the technology powering the internet has only improved, and we’ve all felt how greatly that catnip-like effect has intensified. And the Smithsonian, as we’ve featured here on Open Culture, is still there — now with much more online than gems.

Today, the Smithsonian’s impressive online collections are accessible through Artvee, a new search engine for downloadable high-resolution, public domain artworks. So are the collections of more than 40 other international institutions, from the New York Public Library and the Art Institute of Chicago to the Rijksmuseum and Paris Musées, many of which had little or no online presence back in the early 1990s.

In recent years, they’ve gotten quite serious indeed about digitizing their holdings and making those digitizations freely available to the world, uploading them by the thousand, even by the million. With so many artworks and artifacts already up, and surely much more to come, the question becomes how best to navigate not just one of these collections, but all of them.

Artvee constitutes one answer to this question. Using its search engine, writes Denise Tempone at Domestika, “you can filter categories such as abstract art, landscape, mythology, drawings, illustrations, botany, fashion, figurative art, religion, animal, desserts, history, Japanese art, and still life. The site also gives you the option to search by artist. You will find works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Claude Monet, Raphael, and Sandro Botticelli in this amazing gallery.” Other collections, created by Artvee itself as well as by its users, include “illustrations from fairy tales; covers of popular American songs; and some even more peculiar ones, such as adverts selling bicycles that are over a hundred years old.”

The variety of artists browsable on Artvee also includes Alphonse Mucha, Edvard Munch, and Hilma af Kint; other collections offer the wonders of political illustrations, book promo posters, and NASA’s visions of the future. All of the items within, it bears repeating, are in the public domain or distributed under a Creative Commons license, meaning you can use them not just as sources of inspiration but as ingredients in your own work as well, a possibility few us could have imagined at the dawn of the Web. Back then, you’ll recall, we all used a variety of different tools and portals to navigate the internet, according to personal preference. The emerging field of art search engines, which includes not just Artvee but other options like Museo, may remind us of those days — and how far the internet has come since.

Visit 2+ Million Free Works of Art from 20 World-Class Museums Free Online

The Smithsonian Puts 2.8 Million High-Res Images Online and Into the Public Domain

14 Paris Museums Put 300,000 Works of Art Online: Download Classics by Monet, Cézanne & More

Creative Commons Officially Launches a Search Engine That Indexes 300+ Million Public Domain Images

Flim: a New AI-Powered Movie-Screenshot Search Engine

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Age of Cathedrals: A Free Online Course from Yale University

in Art, History, Online Courses | June 13th, 2021

From Yale professor Howard Bloch comes Age of Cathedrals, an online course that offers “an introduction to some of the most astonishing architectural monuments the world has ever known—Gothic cathedrals,” including Notre Dame, Chartres, and Saint-Denis. The course description adds: “We shall study the art, literature, intellectual life, economics, and new social arrangements that arose in the shadow of the cathedrals and that were such an important part of the revival of cities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The goal of the course is a better appreciation of the High Middle Ages, a world that is still recognizably our own.”

You can take Age of Cathedrals for free by selecting the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the course for a certificate, you will need to pay a fee.

Age of Cathedrals has been added to our list of Free History Courses, a subset of our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere.

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Making Architecture: A Free Online Course from the IE School of Architecture and Design

European Paintings: From Leonardo to Rembrandt to Goya–A Free Online Course from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M

Free Course: An Introduction to the Art of the Italian Renaissance

The Long-Lost Pieces of Rembrandt’s Night Watch Get Reconstructed with Artificial Intelligence

The Artistic & Mystical World of Tarot: See Decks by Salvador Dalí, Aleister Crowley, H.R. Giger & More

1540 Monet Paintings in a Two Hour Video

David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art–and We Do It Anyway (1998)

AI & X-Rays Recover Lost Artworks Underneath Paintings by Picasso & Modigliani

What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Painting?: An Explanation in 15 Minutes

Download Great Works of Art from 40+ Museums Worldwide: Explore Artvee, the New Art Search Engine

The Age of Cathedrals: A Free Online Course from Yale University

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