Almost 350 years after the master artist’s
death, a new Rembrandt painting has been unveiled in Amsterdam, and it’s
creating quite a stir – because the painter this time was a group of art
historians, software developers, scientists, engineers and data analysts, and
their brush and canvas were an extensive database and a 3D printer.
The brainchild of Amsterdam-based ad
agency J. Walter Thompson for its client ING Bank, “The Next Rembrandt”
was an 18-month project that sought to answer the question, “Can the great
master be brought back to create one more painting?” For this challenge, rather
than attempt to raise the dead, the group undertook a remarkable scientific
process to create a new painting based on a meticulous examination of
Rembrandt’s style.
First the group studied the entire collection
of Rembrandt’s work (over 300 paintings), breaking them down pixel by pixel
through high-res 3D scans and digital files that utilized “deep learning
algorithms to maximize resolution and quality.” Then, after a close demographic
study of the subjects of Rembrandt’s works, the team settled on a representative
subject: a portrait of a Caucasian male with facial hair, between the ages of
thirty and forty, dressed in black with a white collar and a hat, gaze turned
to the right.
The team designed a software system that
identified and classified the most typical geometric patterns used by Rembrandt
to paint human features. It reproduced the style to generate new facial
features according to Rembrandt’s proportions. Data about the painter’s use of
light was mined to add authentic shadows onto each feature.
To recreate the texture of a Rembrandt, the
group created a height map using algorithms based on brushstroke patterns and
layers of paint. That information was then run through a 3D printer that output
thirteen layers of paint-based UV ink to mimic Rembrandt’s texture. The result
is a portrait of a 17th century man that even an expert probably could not
distinguish from the real thing.
But as groundbreaking as the technology is, it
did not really create anything even
though the painting is “new.” The technology simply imitated the original
artist’s style to an extraordinarily precise degree, like an infallible master
forger. That’s no small thing – it’s an impressive feat, no question, and there
may be other important applications. But it is ultimately an imitation, not a
creation.
Creation is the skillful manifestation of an
artist’s vision. Sometimes it is wholly original; more often it is a synthesis
of other creations that still produces something new. The “Next Rembrandt” painting
produced by a 3D printer is not an original creation or a synthesis; it is at
bottom a mathematical exercise. With all due respect to the team of technicians
involved, they are not Rembrandt. No one is.
I’m reminded of a college art class I took in
which my photography-obsessed fellow students simply could not, or would not,
acknowledge my argument that there was a vast difference in the artistic skills
necessary for painting and photography. We were comparing the sunlight created
by Dutch painter Vermeer in “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher” to the sunlight streaming
upon Mt. Williamson in a photo by the American nature photographer Ansel Adams (who
at the time was as celebrated for his environmental activism as his art). I
argued that there was simply no comparison between the technique that enabled
Vermeer to create the illusion of sunlight ex
nihilo on a blank canvas, and the actual sunlight merely captured by
Adams with his camera.
This is not to disparage Adams’ artistic eye.
But those students – and the professor too, who was an amateur photographer
himself – refused to see Adams as an artist of lesser skill, even though any one of us in that classroom could have
snapped the same photo under similar conditions with the same camera, while not
one of us could have reproduced the Vermeer sunlight with a brush and blank
canvas. The world-changing technology behind the camera is ingenious, but in
the end a camera can only capture an image, not create it. That image can be
manipulated afterward, of course, but the camera can only reproduce what
already exists – at the mere click of the shutter button.
As for Vermeer’s genius: French novelist
Marcel Proust was so struck by it that he created an art critic in Remembrance of Things Past who literally
dies after experiencing the aesthetic power of a tiny patch of sunlit roof in
Vermeer’s View of Delft. It is difficult
to imagine that Proust would be so profoundly affected by the sunlit
mountainside in a photo Ansel Adams snapped.
To answer the “Next Rembrandt” website’s
question about whether the great Dutch artist could be brought back to create
one more painting, the answer, sadly, is no. Technology may be a brilliant apprentice,
but Rembrandt is still the master.
From Acculturated, 4/12/16
