Artificial intelligence recreated the painting “Expulsion of the Moors” (Expulsion of the Moriscos) by Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), destroyed in a fire almost three hundred years ago, “Pais” reported.
On Christmas Eve in 1734, a fire broke out in Madrid’s then Royal Alcázar Palace, which lasted four days and destroyed around 500 works of art. Among them are works by famous artists such as Ribera, Titian, El Greco, Giordano, Raphael, Rubens, Tintoretto, Velazquez. Diego Velázquez’s painting Meninas was saved by being thrown through a window, and other large canvases were cut from their frames and survived. “The Expulsion of the Moors” (1627), however, was not so lucky, the Spanish edition recalls.
Nearly three centuries later, artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo used artificial intelligence software to recreate Velázquez’s lost work. The result is a four-minute video that begins with what looks like a cloudy, charred canvas.
Sánchez Castillo is not starting his work from scratch – the artificial intelligence technology must be provided with data, Pais notes. In the video, a clear image slowly emerges of King Felipe III ordering the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. In the period between 1609 and 1614, about 250,000 people were forced to leave the country, the publication recalls. Sánchez believes that Velázquez was the first to create a painting that showed “the two faces of Spain and the Islamophobia of the time”.
#Amazing #Artificial #intelligence #recreates #work #great #artist
