Mumbai: AI can now help find missing art. Italian police are using it to track down paintings stolen decades ago, including one that had been missing for more than 50 years and another that was painted over to disguise it.
The BBC reported Wednesday that Italy’s cultural heritage police have been using the Stolen Works of Art Detection System (Swoads) to search for missing artworks. The software compares photographs from auction websites and online catalogues with a database of stolen art, and can recognise paintings even when parts of them have been altered.
Italy has maintained a database of stolen art since 1969. It now contains more than a million records, including paintings stolen from churches and ancient artefacts excavated illegally.
Earlier, police had to visit antique shops, fairs and auctions, comparing artworks they found with photographs and descriptions in the database. Many of the photographs were decades old, blurry or in black and white. Identifying a painting was even harder if someone had altered it.
Swoads was introduced in November 2023. Developed by Italy’s cultural heritage police, it uses AI to compare colours, shapes and other visual details. The software can also identify fragments of paintings that have been cut up and sold separately.
A painting missing for more than 50 years
One of the paintings recovered this year was Riposo della Pastorella (The Rest of the Shepherdess), by Italian painter Filippo Palizzi. It was stolen from the Carlo Rizzarda gallery in Feltre in June 1972. Police found it listed for auction online and returned it to the gallery in April.
Another painting recovered using Swoads was Sant’Agnese (Saint Agnes), stolen from a church in Sulmona in August 2004.
In October 2024, Italian police were photographing artworks at an antiques fair in Parma and checking them using Swoads. Within hours, the system identified a painting of a young woman holding a scroll as a possible match for Sant’Agnese.
The stolen painting, however, depicted Saint Agnes holding a lamb and a palm branch, with a halo around her head. Someone had painted over the lamb to make it look like a scroll, and removed the halo and palm branch. Police returned to the fair the next day and seized the painting.
“Regardless of whether it makes sense or not, it recognises it because it’s part of a whole that was stolen,” Lieutenant Colonel Salvatore Rapicavoli, who helped develop Swoads, told the BBC.
How AI is changing the search for stolen art
The system has helped Italian police recover more than 300 paintings and sculptures and over 165,000 smaller objects, including coins, manuscripts and religious items. Together, these are worth more than €203 million.
Other countries are also using AI to recover stolen art. Turkey has used it to recover 15th-century tiles from the UK, while German cultural institutions have developed a system called Kiku. Researchers at Boston University are using AI to identify antiquities that may have been stolen from Cambodia. Interpol also has an image-recognition app called ID-Art.
The technology, however, has limitations. It struggles to recognise three-dimensional objects photographed from different angles and cannot always distinguish an original painting from a copy. It also cannot identify artworks that were never reported stolen.
“The recovery still depends on investigators and legal cooperation,” Carina Popovici, co-founder of art authentication company Art Recognition, told the BBC.
The most famous stolen artworks are also unlikely to appear in auction catalogues, as thieves often avoid selling them through channels where they could be identified.
“I don’t expect the system is going to find me the Antonello Da Messina works that were stolen this summer, let’s be very clear,” Rapicavoli told the BBC. “I don’t expect it to find me Caravaggio’s Nativity, one of our ‘Most Wanted’.”
(Edited By Raunaq Lekhi)