An analysis of two paintings in museums in the US and Italy by the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck has raised a profound question: what if neither were by Van Eyck?
Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, the name given to near-identical unsigned paintings hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Royal Museums of Turin, represent two of the small number of surviving works by one of western art’s greatest masters, revered for his naturalistic portraits and religious subjects.
The only problem is that neither version may actually be by his hand.
Scientific tests involving artificial intelligence on the paintings conducted by Art Recognition, a Swiss company that collaborates on research with Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has been unable to detect any of Van Eyck’s brushstrokes. It has concluded that the Philadelphia picture was “91% negative” and that the Turin version was “86% negative”.
Till-Holger Borchert, one of the leading Van Eyck scholars and director of the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, said the Van Eyck findings supported scholars who had suggested that both versions were studio paintings – produced in the artist’s workshop but not necessarily by him.
He said that, although he was “surprised” by the analysis, it posed further questions that needed to be explored.
Dr Carina Popovici, Art Recognition’s chief executive, said that such high negative percentages for the paintings were particularly dramatic. In contrast, an analysis of another Van Eyck – The Arnolfini Portrait, which is among the most popular paintings in the National Gallery in London – said it was 89% likely to be authentic.
She said she had also been taken aback by the findings: “I expected that, if one painting was negative, the other would be positive. But no, both came out negative.”
She told the Guardian: “I’m guessing that the Philadelphia and Turin museums won’t be happy. It’s not good news on these paintings.” The Philadelphia and Turin museums have been contacted for comment. Critics have contended that a paintings’ condition and later restorations may affect such AI-based brushstroke analysis.
Dr Noah Charney, an art historian who discussed the initial Philadelphia painting’s findings on his podcast, described Art Recognition’s previous analyses as “remarkably accurate” and said that the negative result for both pictures had been so surprising that deeper tests had been conducted to confirm the results.
He said he had expected that the Turin picture would be confirmed as by Van Eyck, and that the Philadelphia version would emerge as a copy, whether from the artist’s workshop or later.
“The negative results suggest that both of these pictures are studio works, which may mean that we have a lost original that was more fully by Van Eyck’s hand than these two,” he said.
“If a work comes out of Van Eyck’s studio, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he actually physically painted the surface level of all aspects of it,” he said on his podcast. “That’s a misconception that people get from this 19th-century idea of the lone artist in a garret in Paris drinking absinthe, smoking cigarettes, wearing a beret and doing every aspect of the work themselves.”
Van Eyck is regarded as one of the pioneers of oil painting. “[Van Eyck] didn’t invent oil painting, but he perfected it so thoroughly that everyone else seemed to be working in his shadow for centuries,” Charney said. “His surfaces shimmer with light in detail so fine you need a magnifying glass to take it all in. Every stone, hair, reflection, and a glint seems to be rendered with a kind of supernatural clarity.
“That ability to make the everyday luminous is why many consider him not only a great painter, but one of the great observers of reality in all of western art. And yet for all his fame, Van Eyck’s surviving oeuvre is small: fewer than 20 paintings are universally accepted as by his own hand.”
The National Gallery in London is preparing to stage an exhibition of Van Eyck portraits in November.
Among previous analyses, Art Recognition detected up to 40 fake paintings that were being offered on eBay in 2024. It also concluded in 2021 that Rubens’ Samson and Delilah in the National Gallery was “91% negative”, supporting critics who have long doubted that it was painted by the 17th-century Flemish master.
