This Rembrandt Artwork Has Puzzled Researchers For 380 Years

Rembrandt painted The Night Watch in 1642, at the height of his fame during the Dutch Golden Age. But the painting we see today is not exactly what Rembrandt painted. In 1715, the canvas was trimmed on all four sides to fit between two doors in Amsterdam's Town Hall. Sixty centimeters were cut from the left alone, along with smaller strips from the top, bottom, and right. Those pieces were thrown away and have never been found. Using a 717-gigapixel scan, AI trained on Rembrandt's own brushstrokes, and a surviving 17th-century copy of the original composition, researchers at the Rijksmuseum were able to study what was lost and reconstruct an idea of how The Night Watch originally looked. This is the story of how a museum used artificial intelligence to bring back a masterpiece nobody has seen complete in three hundred years.