Asia-Pacific Newsweek
Barthélémy Jobert was so full of concentration in the 19th century that he had a broad view of it: for him it began in the 1760s and began in the 1920s. He was the leading art historian in Paris and now the former president of the Sorbonne University, and he was the work of Eugène Delacroix, a French romantic artist known for his 1830 painting “Free Leading the People”, a strong anti-royal work that portrays a citizen who opposed the insurgents. Now, Jobert will greatly enhance his ability to use artificial intelligence and other 21st century technologies in his years of pursuit and to solve mysteries of its belonging.
This week, Schmidt Sciences, a nonprofit founded by former Google CEO Eric Schhmidt and his wife Wendy Schmidt, plans to announce a new grant program that will be funded for Jobert’s project, known as Digital Delacroix, and is considered to be the top six figure. Jobert’s goal is to digitize and analyze many of Delacroix’s things—his letters and journals, murals he painted in the second half of his career, and even contemporary newspaper coverage of men and their works—and cross-references for academic purposes while placing them online for others to explore. Schmidt’s grant will allow him to gain more computing power by hiring several researchers trained in art history and artificial intelligence (a rare breed even in France) and enhance the current group of six.
For Schmidt Sciences, Digital Delacroix is the first of 10 to 15 grant recipients to receive $10 million in AI application for humanities studies. Expected spending prices range from less than $100,000 to $1.5 million. (Schmidt Sciences doesn’t provide exact numbers for its support for the digital Delacroix.) Sorbonne University briefly announced the organization’s participation in February, shortly after, after an international AI summit in Paris, but it hasn’t been detailed until now.
For Jobert, this is the climax of his passion for nearly 40 years since his young teaching researcher at Harvard. Before Delacroix’s “Lament” he stood in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a 1848 canvas, after being crucifixed, mourners around the mourners, when he was beaten by a figure in the foreground: John Baptist, Baptist in a red cape, often symbolizing his beheading. “I can’t explain why, but to me, this red cape is the image of the soul.”
At this time, Jobert formed an informal French consortium, which included the Ministry of Culture, the National Centre for Scientific Research, and the Centre for the Humanities, the Sorbonne AI and other institutions. Work on digitization of text is underway, so Jobert’s attention is currently focused on the murals of the grand buildings occupied by the French parliament, almost never open to the public.
His focus is on the National Assembly – the House of Commons that occupied the 18th century bourbon. “We have two projects,” he said. “The first is to make them accessible on the website” – enabling people to visit the Legislature Library virtually, the vast conference hall that Delacroix worked hard for nine years and amplify whatever they want. The second goal is to analyze these murals to solve the attribution problem: What did Delacroix paint himself, and he left it to his assistant? “This is the part where AI plays a major role,” he said.
This is also part of Schmidt’s science involvement. “This multi-author problem is really a tough one,” said Brent Seales, a U.S. computer scientist, a humanities and humanities branch of the organization. He added that using AI to solve it is difficult to solve, “This is one of the reasons why I like it.”
The SEALs have had serious problems before. A few years ago, he and his team at the University of Kentucky invented a process that uses AI, among other technologies, to interpret the contents of carbonized papyrus scrolls excavated from the Dead Coast and excavated from the Roman villa that broke out in the outbreak.
“As philanthropists, we have the ability to take risks that governments and businesses cannot or cannot,” Wendy Schmidt said in an email. Bloomberg currently estimates Schmidt’s wealth to be $32.5 billion.
One of the reasons attribution efforts is expected to be difficult is that it relies on analytical AI, a fork in the field that is completely different from generative AI, which makes the current madness unleash tools like Chatgpt in 2022. With Breakneck Advanceds Anii, the progress that generated AI has made since then is almost similar to that of tortoise torto.
To figure out who drew what, the researchers under Jobert directed them made high-resolution photos of the mural and reconstructed the work of the digital 3-D using photogrammetry. The Ministry of Culture’s research department provides technical data on Delacroix and other painters. All of this will be fed into a computer vision system, which will be trained to recognize Delacroix’s brushstrokes and his studio assistant’s brushstrokes. “We think it has the potential to work,” said Xavier Fresquet, deputy director of the Sorbonner Center for Artificial Intelligence.
Jobert wants to do the same with the mural in a magnificent room in the 17th-century royal palace Du Luxembourg. But his ultimate goal is more ambitious than this: the virtual reconstruction of the allegorical fresco of Delacroix once adorned the Salon de la Paix in the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall of Paris. Their core element is “peace landing on Earth”, a ceiling group that, in the words of 19th-century writer and critic théophilegautier, “the earth weeps, raises its eyes and begs to heaven, begging for her sorrow.”
The prayers of the earth will not be answered in life, if not in art. In 1871, eight years after the death of Delacroix, his murals rose along with the rest of the building when the Parisian revolutionaries were crushed by government forces. What remains in the archive is a photo, a sketch of Delacroix, some etchings and two watercolors, and was presented to Queen Victoria by Queen Napoleon III in 1855. Still, Jobert hopes he can come up with a reasonable fax for the mural.
“We won’t give you exact room copy like this. It’s impossible,” he said. “But we will give you everything that could have been” – if peace does fall, it will still be.
