National Prado Museum
Santa Úrsula with the 11,000 virgins
With the help of a technology start-up, the Prado Museum in Madrid is resorting to technology to quantify large crowds in their works of art and increase visitors involvement.
According to legend, the young woman who would become Santa Úrsula He departed from his Natal England in the fourth century to travel through the European continent.
The reasons for your trip – to marry a man at the request of his father or to make a pilgrimage to Rome – are clumsy.
But a vivid, although unlikely, settled detail: his traveling companions were about 11,000 virgins.
Despite its number, The trip had a tragic end. When the group of thousands arrived in Colonia, Germany, All perished in the hands of the Huns., tells a.
O Úrsula legacy survived in holiness. Their legions of virgins survived in the arts. A painting, “, created around 1490, was so striking that its unknown author was nicknamed“Master of the 11,000 Virgins“.
But if we look more carefully to the painting, which is exposed at the Prado Museum in Madrid, and Try to tell all 11,000 virgins supposedly represented, or We lost the bill or are bitterly disappointed. The so -called “Master of the 11,000 Virgins” painted only 139.
This count is the result of Prado’s new initiative based on artificial intelligence: called “Telling Prado“The program is a joint effort from the museum and the Spanish AI start-up that developed an algorithm capable of Identify and count objects and people in a selection of works of art.
For a painting such as “Santa Ursula with the 11,000 virgins”, counting until 139 is not an impossible task for a concentrated human.
This is not the case, for example, “OMMEGANG Celebration in Brussels: Guild Procession” e “OMMEGANG Celebration in Brussels: The Procession of Our Lady of Sablon“, Both painted by Flamengo Denis van Alsloot em 1616.
In an inquiry created by Prado, the museum asks its visitors which of the two paintings has the most characters. At first glance, both have large crowds. But with a count of 1,761 people, the “Guild Procession” There are more people.
For Prado, these puzzles are created for generate involvement On social networks, encouraging observers to study details and quantities that our eyes would normally ignore.
“Parades, triumphant entrances, landings and festivities”There are precisely the types of events that your AI model was designed to tell, as Sherpa.ai Num explains.
The objective of the project is “give life to the museum’s collection In a creative and universal way, identifying details in a selection of works of art where the quantity, repetition or agglomeration are essential to the theme represented. ”
For years, Prado has been at the forefront of the use of AI to increase the accessibility of your collections. In 2019, for example, the museum began to use IA to provide more background information about various works of art.
In other places, art historians are using Ia for more experimental purposes, such as recreating lost masterpieces. By comparison, Prado’s goals are quite straightforward.
“Our brains are quite skilled in rapidly and precisely to perceive the number of items in a set, But only to some extent“Writes the.“Why not ask for help from AI?”
