This Rembrandt Was Painted By A Computer And It's Flawless

A Computer Pretended It Was Rembrandt And Painted A Masterpiece
Open Image Modal
The Next Rembrandt

To the casual eyeball this looks like a Rembrandt, hidden until now when it has finally been brought back into the light and revealed to the world.

Except it isn't some long lost Rembrandt, in fact the painter isn't even human, it's a computer.

This is 'The Next Rembrandt', the result of a project commissioned by ING as part of its sponsorship for Dutch art. Over the last 18-months has been carried out by art historians, software developers, scientists, engineers and data analysts to bring the 17th Century historian back to life.

The team took Rembrandt's 300+ paintings and meticulously 3D scanned them before uploading them to the cloud.

This would reveal everything about the paintings from common traits to subtle differences that even the human eye wouldn't be able to detect.

Using all of this information the team were able to then create an AI-like version of Rembrandt himself.

Open Image Modal
The Next Rembrandt

Once it crunched all the data together it would then produce an original piece of artwork.

To nail the finished piece the computer was equipped with a state-of-the-art 3D printer which then created the finished work using 13 layers of UV ink.

Open Image Modal
The Next Rembrandt

The end result is without a doubt astonishing to say the least, and while it poses some rather terrifying questions about the future of forgeries the team says this wasn't part of the plan.

What you're looking at then is an AI-created masterpiece, formed using 148 million pixels from 160,000 fragments of Rembrandt's works.

Open Image Modal
The Next Rembrandt