As I think Artificial Intelligence can be a strong and - sometimes - decisive way for working upon visual-historic issues, this time, my pick regards my own experiments on the "Christ from Lecco", a sanguine belonging to a private Italian collection and attributed to Leonardo, who would have executed it around the year 1500. So I’ve used 7 image editing tools: Artificial Intelligence algorithms plus anatomical and aesthetic enhancements.
Some issues were considered in order to get closer to a result more faithful to what the experiment proposed: To start with, the lines and shadows in "Lecco" are not enough to give us a better defined physiognomy. In addition, there was a noticeable lightening in the blood marks due to the wear and tear of time, and this is something to be careful about.
Some issues were considered in order to get closer to a result more faithful to what the experiment proposed: To start with, the lines and shadows in "Lecco" are not enough to give us a better defined physiognomy. In addition, there was a noticeable lightening in the blood marks due to the wear and tear of time, and this is something to be careful about.
Regarding specifically the living model used by the artist, the challenge was to try to discard, in a partial way, Leonardo's style in the search for the Messiah's face. Each Master of Painting, more or less consciously, imputed his particular way of portraying a model - it was the style of him. The greatest proof of this is to look at the slight differences on the same portrait in the strokes of different artists. This is correct in terms of expressing the genius of each one, but on the other hand, the technique could also bring certain dissonances to the objective reality about the face of the represented. In certain cases, this "escape" from reality could even be due to some imposition by the person who was commissioning the portrait... Yes, the models, centuries ago, also used the so famous “filters" at the time to improve their own look.
"Christ from Lecco" Project - Phase 3: Living Model X Creation. If we could to "discount" that natural artistic idealization by Leonardo, in a reverse manner, it could reveal the true physiognomy that had served as the basis for the Lombard genius (IMAGES: Private archive - Átila Soares / GM Private collection).
I remember having attended a lecture by the scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carrière in 1993 when he spoke about his work process for “Valmont" (by director Milos Forman) from 1989. He pointed that since the inspiration for the film was the novel “The Dangerous Liaisons" (a Jacobean work by Chordelos de Laclos), written as a collection of letters exchanges, we should note that when we send messages, our tendency is to distort the facts here or there, to a greater or lesser extent. Starting from this reasonable premise, Carrière, thus, justifies why there are so many discrepancies between the events in the film and what was narrated in the content of the letters along the pages in Laclos' romance. In the same way, I think that it is up to the researcher, in the field of the History of Visual Arts, to have this notion about up to what point the representation of someone should be committed to reality... It may not be the simplest of tasks, but it is certainly not unfeasible.
Professor Átila Soares da Costa Filho (Opening picture: The city of Florence, birth of Renaissance in Italy - New York Academy of Art).