New A.I. Project Explores Mysteries of Delacroix, Master of Romanticism

New York Times

26-03-2025

Barthélémy Jobert is so engrossed in the 19th century that he takes an expansive view of it: For him it began intellectually in the 1760s and ran into the 1920s. A leading art historian in Paris and former president of what is now Sorbonne University, he is particularly expert in the work of Eugène Delacroix, the French Romantic artist best known for his 1830 painting 'Liberty Leading the People,' a stridently anti-royalist work depicting citizens rising up against a despot. Now, Jobert will be getting a significant boost in his ability to use artificial intelligence and other 21st-century technologies in his yearslong quest to explore Delacroix's art and resolve mysteries about its attribution.
This week, Schmidt Sciences, a nonprofit founded by the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, plans to announce a new grantmaking program that will underwrite Jobert's project, known as Digital Delacroix, with funding thought to be in the high six figures. Jobert aims to digitize and analyze many things Delacroix — his letters and journals, the murals he painted in the second half of his career, even contemporary newspaper accounts of the man and his work — and cross-reference them for scholarly purposes while putting them online for others to explore. The grant from Schmidt will allow him to obtain more computing power and augment his current team of six by hiring a couple of researchers trained in both art history and A.I. — a rare breed, even in France.
For Schmidt Sciences, Digital Delacroix is the first of a projected 10 to 15 grant recipients that will receive a total of $10 million to apply A.I. to research in the humanities. Outlays are expected to range from less than $100,000 to as much as $1.5 million. (Schmidt Sciences would not provide an exact figure for its support of Digital Delacroix.) Sorbonne University made a brief announcement of the organization's involvement in February, shortly after an international A.I. summit was held in Paris, but its role has not been detailed until now.
For Jobert, it's the culmination of a passion he's had for almost 40 years, ever since he was a young teaching fellow at Harvard. He was standing in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts before Delacroix's 'The Lamentation,' an 1848 canvas that shows mourners surrounding the body of Christ after the crucifixion, when he was struck by a figure in the foreground: John the Baptist, draped in the red cloak that often symbolizes his beheading. 'I cannot explain why,' Jobert said in a video interview, 'but for me, this red cloak is the image of soul.'
At this point, Jobert has assembled an informal consortium of French institutions that includes units of the Ministry of Culture and the National Center for Scientific Research as well as a center for the humanities, a center for A.I. and other agencies at Sorbonne University. Work on digitizing the texts is well underway, so Jobert's attention is currently centered on the murals Delacroix painted for the grand buildings occupied by the French Parliament, in rooms that are almost never open to the public.
His focus is on the National Assembly — the lower house of Parliament, which occupies the 18th-century Palais Bourbon. 'We have two projects,' he said. 'The first one is to make them accessible on a website' — to enable people to take a virtual tour of the legislature's library, the vast chamber where Delacroix labored for nine years, and to zoom in on anything they want. The second goal is to analyze these murals to settle questions of attribution: What did Delacroix paint himself, and what did he leave to his assistants? 'This is the part in which A.I. is playing the main role,' he said.
It's also the part where Schmidt Sciences steps in. 'This question of multiple authorship is a really tricky one,' said Brent Seales, the American computer scientist who heads the organization's humanities-and-A.I. branch. Using A.I. to solve it is hard, he added, 'which is one of the reasons I love it.'
Seales has encountered hard problems before. Years ago he and his team at the University of Kentucky invented a process that used A.I., among other technologies, to decipher the contents of carbonized papyrus scrolls excavated from the banks of the Dead Sea and from a Roman villa that was buried in the eruption that destroyed Pompeii.
'As philanthropists, we have the ability to take risks that government and businesses cannot or will not,' Wendy Schmidt said in an email. Bloomberg currently estimates the Schmidts' wealth at $32.5 billion.
One reason the attribution effort is expected to be difficult is that it relies on analytical A.I., a branch of the field that's quite distinct from generative A.I., which set off the current frenzy with the release of tools like ChatGPT in 2022. Compared with the breakneck advances generative A.I. has made since, progress in analytical A.I. seems almost tortoise-like.
To figure out who painted what, researchers under Jobert's direction have made up-close, high-resolution photographs of the murals and reconstructed the works in digital 3-D using photogrammetry. Technical data on Delacroix and other painters is being provided by a research unit within the Ministry of Culture. All of this will be fed into a computer vision system that will be trained to recognize Delacroix's brushstrokes and those of his studio assistants. 'We think there's a high possibility it will work,' said Xavier Fresquet, deputy director of the Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence.
Jobert wants to do the same with the murals in an even grander chamber in the 17th-century Palais du Luxembourg, home of the Senate. But his ultimate goal is far more ambitious than that: a virtual reconstruction, using generative A.I., of the allegorical murals by Delacroix that once adorned the Salon de la Paix in the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall of Paris. Their central element was 'Peace Descends to Earth,' a ceiling panel that depicted, in the words of the 19th-century writer and critic Théophile Gautier, 'the earth weeping, raising her eyes to heaven to plead for an end to her sorrows.'
Earth's prayers would go unanswered, in life if not in art. In 1871, eight years after Delacroix's death, his murals went up in flames along with the rest of the building when the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune torched the place as they were being crushed by government forces. What remains in the archives is a single photograph, Delacroix's sketches, some etchings and two watercolors presented to Queen Victoria in 1855 by the Emperor Napoleon III. Nonetheless, Jobert is hopeful that he'll be able to come up with a reasonable facsimile of the Hôtel de Ville murals.
'We won't give you an exact reproduction of the room as it was. That's impossible,' he said. 'But we will give you what it could have been' — and would be still, if peace had indeed descended.