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Is This Rembrandt a Real One?
Roland Piquepaille writes "About a year ago, I told you about how computer scientists from Dartmouth college were investigating digital images. But they're also interested in old paintings authentication, as reports Wired Magazine in The Rembrandt Code. Mathematicians are using high-resolution digital cameras and computers to examine old paintings and evaluate their authenticity. Even the New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is asking them to discover which of the 42 paintings it owns and that were once believed to be Rembrandts are really authentic. The Wired article is pretty entertaining, but this overview contains more details, pictures and references about this authentication process."
I know that it is a Slashdot controversy, but can anyone tell me here whether or not the Slashdot editors have addressed just why it is that so many of Roland Piquepaille's articles get posted, particularly by Zonk? Does he really submit that many articles to Slashdot? I know that there have been a number of instances where some Slashdot users have submitted articles only to have them rejected and later accepted after submission by Roland Piquepaille... So, what gives?
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I mean, the pictures are good enough for the museum for all of these years. And if no one (even art scholars) can tell the difference, who cares if they are "real rembrandts" or not? Just because some guy happened to have painted them (or not) the paintings are no worse than they always have been. Will the museum keep them on display, and credit them to an unknown artist? Or is the controversy more in the fact that they paintings may be "copyright infringements"?
If it is a real painting (ie not a copy but a true hand painting) why does it matter who painted it? They obviously had talent.
After digging some more, I'm an idiot and the people getting pissed over this are idiots too.
a ille+writes&sort=1&op=stories&threshold=1
/. search turned up belonged to him, so lay off.
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=Roland+Piquep
I skipped back through the history and he's been submitting stories since 2002. I randomly spot checked untill i got to 270 articles. The vast vast vast majority of those articles the
It seems like slashbots (me included) occasionaly go into fits of hysterics over a perceived abuse of the submissions bin. See past threads belonging to Roland Piquepaille for examples.
As I drew my original conclusion in pencil, I'd ask that whoever has points mod my previous post and (others like it) -1 Overrated
I will now STFU. Thank you for listening.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
A major use for the software is determining which paintings are by Abstract Impressionist and those by chimpazees. Thus far experts have been unable to reliably determine which was responsible for many works by unknown artists. A musuem recieved an expensive shock when the software determined a Jackson Pollack was actually a house painter with a leaky bucket and the canvas was actually a tarp. The musuem argued back that it was Jackson Pollack with a leaky bucket but the computer was unconvienced by the argument and stuck by it's first conclusion that the tarp was produced by a 300lb house painter named Sid.
It's not just Rembrandt's personal technique. Rembrandt worked with multiple layers, allowing light to permeate the background and to reflect off of his subjects in the painting. This sensuous interest in the physical attributes of the body and its many colors, tonalities, and reflections created an impression of richness and fullness of form. The fact that his lines were more often suggested than revealed, as evidenced by his self-portrait in 1669, suggests the the bodies he paints are more naturalistic and complex than they let on.
To feel for a Rembrandt painting is to watch the subjects evoke emotion and a secular pathos that is thick with a somewhat ungraceful suggestion of form, in which paintings would sometimes look unfinished, perhaps, or rather, lacking a rigid definition of form.
You cannot just recreate this technique. It takes the painter who originally defined a style and technique to illustrate why the technique is being so revered. Many copied Warhol, but none are genuine Warhols. And Warhol merely did silk screens!
Notice that it's the artist who is creative and unique that is revered, not the imposer or forgery.
Don't eat your soul to fill your belly.
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Being able to copy a painting doesn't imply talent.
Remember in grade school when your art teacher told you to copy a picture? First, you put a grid over the source picture and draw a grid scaled up or down over the destination picture. You then try to replicate each box as well as you can.
It usually turns out quite well.
Now, try doing that without a picture to copy. You know how all of the techniques work, how and when to use them, but you still won't be able to draw a "masterpiece".
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Ironic how the /. editors bitch and moan so much over censorship when they abuse their mod powers like this. Clearly, they couldn't give a damn about their professed love for all things free once their egos are at stake.
Wikipedia has a note about Roland's deletion. It seems, they think, he's unworthy of a Wiki article. However, they do feel that figging is.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
As you can guess, Rockmore disagrees and comes with an analogy of his own. For him, analyzing paintings and drawings is like comparing chess and checkers. And for him, computer programs have already beaten men in chess tournaments. So will art historians be the next victims of computers? Time will tell.
On the other hand if you happened to choose chess and go, then you would reach a completely different conclusion. Since they're both two player strategy games with fairly simple rules, but while computers are obviously excellent at playing chess they've always sucked at playing go (and are highly likely to go on sucking in the forseeable future). Just because two problems are in a similar area doesn't mean they'll both be amenable to computer analysis.
There are two issues involved here. They are Legitimacy and Meaning, and they hinge on the question of whether we're considering a fake Rembrandt or a copied Rembrandt.
A fake Rembrandt is a picture Rembrandt never painted but which was done in his style and with his techniques. A copied Rembrandt is a reproduction of a picture he did paint, where the original was lost before the advent of photography. There's no evidence to show that the copy isn't the original.
It may not be terribly important to find out whether a given painting is an original or a copy. Either way, Rembrandt created the ideas in it. It's a reflection of his worldview, and its his statement as an artist. The value would probably plummet for emotional and romantic reasons. This is the issue of Legitimacy and you can feel however you like about that.
A fake Rembrandt is a very different deal. Suppose that, five hundred years from now, film historians thought the movie Grease was actually made during the Fifties. Grease embodies the way that people felt about the Fifties and remebered it decades later. It is a depiction of the era, not a product of the era. Similarly, a fake Rembrandt is a depiction of Rembrandtness, not a production of Rembrandt.
Determining the authenticity of a piece affects the interpretation both of all other pieces by that artist and our understanding of the time in which the faker lived.
Alternately, suppose it was discovered that almost all of Hamlet was written by Shakespeare, but the famous To Be soliloquy was not. That speech would still be beautiful and much studied, but our understanding of the meaning of it would undoubtedly change.
Fundamentally, geeks find it very difficult to understand that a given painting is not important. It is that paintings contribution to the world of artistic ideas which is important. When you go to see the Mona Lisa you won't melt or suddenly smell the sea air of Renaissance Italy. There's no magic there. If you don't understand Renaissance art or plan to study it, there's probably no point in seeing the painting. It's just a chick with a funny look on her face. There are paintings from the modern era, illustrations or comic book pages or whatever, which will genuinely speak much more directly to you. They're painted in the language of your time.
The place where the two issues intersect is that an artist may well have put Meaning in some very tiny aspect of a painting which a copy cannot reproduce. Geeks are used to thinking that any data can be transcoded between forms. Music can be digitized to "beyond the range of human hearing," text can be typed, pictures can be scanned. The difference with a painting is that it is not actually a flat image on a piece of paper. A painting is a three dimensional sculpture, though a shallow one. The colour is only part of the visual information in a painting. Gloss, texture, thickness, translucency and a dozen other factors are also important.
Again, the geek cry tends to be "but the human perceptual system just merges these together." That's sort of true, but if the viewer moves his head, everything changes.
Because of this detail, it does matter whether a painting is the original or a copy. If it's a copy, we know some of the meaning has probably been lost. It may look like something Rembrandt could have painted, but it will only be what someone thought Rembrandt was saying, not what he actually said. It's a paraphrase.
Conclusion: Authenticity matters if you care about art for reasons beyond the monetary.
But if an artist can paint as well as one
of the Masters, shouldn't we be excited to find a 'fake'
because it means that there is another great painter out
there who we know nothing about - and who paints so well
that even an art expert can't point out why that person
is a worse painter than Rembrandt?
If I wanted a copyist, we have excellent reproductions to choose from. Columbus went to America 500 years ago. I went there 10 years ago. He was breaking new ground, I was just following a well-travelled path. That's also why it's not interesting if I could paint a picture like Rembrandt, even if I mimiced his style to the point where it could have been a Rembrandt. If I want to be the "next Rembrandt" I would have to find something of my own, and if it hit big there'd be copyists, but they would also be nothing more than that.
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