AMSTERDAM (AP) — One of Rembrandt van Rijn’s largest paintings just got even bigger.
A combination of art and artificial intelligence has allowed the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to recreate a portion of Rembrandt’s iconic painting “The Night Watch,” which was cut up 70 years after it was completed.
The printed strip hangs snugly over the edge of the 1642 painting, which is currently on display in the museum’s Honorary Gallery, and its addition restores to the work the off-center focal point originally intended by Rembrandt, the rebellious Golden Age master.
“Now you can breathe,” museum director Taco Dibbits told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The two main figures in the crowded painting, Captain Frans Bannink Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruitenburg, are depicted in the center of the truncated painting. New digital additions, particularly the two men on the left side of the painting, clearly showing a boy looking down over the railing, have effectively shifted the main figures to the right.
“This painting really gives it a different dynamic,” Dibbits said, “and what I learned from this painting is that Rembrandt never does what you expect.”
The museum has long known that the original, uncut painting is larger, thanks to a much smaller copy painted around the same time, attributed to Gerrit Lundens.
Researchers and conservators spent nearly two years painstakingly examining the work using an array of high-tech scanners, X-rays and digital photography, generating a massive amount of data that they combined with Landens’ copies to reconstruct and print the missing strips.
“We took very detailed photographs of ‘The Night Watch’ and then, through artificial intelligence, what we call a neural network, we taught a computer what colors Rembrandt used in ‘The Night Watch’, what the colors were, what the brushstrokes looked like,” Dibbits said.
Machine learning also enabled the museum to remove perspective distortions in Lundens’ copy that were caused by the artist sitting in the corner while painting the Rembrandt.
The reason why the 1642 group portrait of the Amsterdam militia was cut is simple: it was moved from the militia clubhouse to the city hall and could not fit on the wall between the two doors. Cutting it in a very analog way with scissors gave the painting the dimensions we’ve known for centuries. The fate of the cut-out canvas fragments remains a mystery.
The digital reconstruction, which will be unveiled in the coming months, is part of a research and restoration project called “Operation Night Watch,” which began about two years ago, before the global pandemic forced the museum to close for several months.
The Netherlands’ coronavirus lockdown has been eased, allowing museums to welcome more visitors from this weekend, but still at around half their usual capacity.
During the restoration project, the painting was housed in a specially designed glass chamber and studied in unprecedented detail, from the canvas to the last layer of varnish.
From that trove of data, the researchers combined 528 digital images to create the most detailed picture of the painting to date.
The painting, painted in 1642, was last extensively restored after being slashed by a man with a knife more than 40 years ago, and parts of the canvas are starting to show signs of bleaching.
Dibbits said the newly printed additions are not meant to trick visitors into thinking the painting is larger, but to clearly communicate how the painting originally looked.
“Rembrandt would no doubt have painted it more beautifully, but this is very close,” he said.
