Artificial Intelligence Uncovers Unique Masterpieces in the Hermitage
Artificial intelligence has helped uncover hundreds of previously unknown English satirical engravings in the State Hermitage Museum, revealing unique works that have no counterparts anywhere else in the world.
AI Reveals Hidden Masterpieces
Russia has applied artificial intelligence to the study of fine art. The Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the European University has developed a machine‑vision service powered by neural networks capable of conducting comparative analysis of museum collections. The first project focused on English satirical engravings from the 18th and 19th centuries held by the State Hermitage Museum.
The Saint Petersburg collection includes about 8,000 engravings, while the British Museum database contains more than 26,000 examples. Algorithms analyzed millions of paired combinations and discovered that roughly 100 works in Russia have no analogues worldwide. In total, the system identified more than 2,000 unique engravings within the Hermitage collection. While human experts would have needed at least twenty years for such work, AI completed the task in a fraction of the time.
Cataloguing the Unseen
According to Anastasia Starobykhovskaya, head of the laboratory, the new service is not just a digital catalog but an “intelligent tool capable of proposing hypotheses about authorship, characters, and interior details.” These technologies are opening entirely new horizons for art history.
Based on the project’s results, researchers will compile a complete catalog of Hermitage caricatures, including detailed descriptions of the newly identified unique works. A public website is now in development, allowing anyone to explore this extraordinary collection.
