Replicating Classic Art Works

 

[Art and technology have been colliding for some time.  Earlier instances of this conjunction seem primitive today, the distance between Frankenstein’s monster and a clone.  But that hasn’t stopped either side of the connection from forging ahead, for good or ill.

[Here’s a report on a pairing of computer technology and painting to examine and analyze works of art, identify deterioration from aging and mishandling, determine authenticity, and—and this is the truly controversial application—duplicate the work. 

[Yes, someone’s developed a computer that can scan and then copy a painting so precisely that the replicant can hardly be distinguished from the original.  The company at the center of this story is cloning paintings. 

[It sounds like a horror story in the world of art.  What could go wrong?] 

“3D TECH PRESERVES AND REPRODUCES MASTERPIECES,
RAISING ETHICAL QUESTIONS”
by Paul Solman and Diane Lincoln Estes

[This is a transcript of a PBS News Hour segment that aired on 15 January 2026; the online version (with video) is posted at 3D tech preserves and reproduces masterpieces, raising ethical questions | PBS News.]

3D scanning technology is being used to examine and replicate classic works of art. It’s raising some ethical questions about what it means to preserve authenticity and democratize access in an age when the line between originals and copies grows ever thinner. Paul Solman reports for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Amna Nawaz [Co-Anchor of PBS News Hour]: The art of 3-D scanning.

Paul Solman looks at how technology is being used to examine and replicate classic works of art and some ethical questions about what it means to preserve authenticity and democratize access in an age when the line between originals and copies grows ever thinner.

It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Paul Solman: [In close-up, a hand reaches out to rub across The Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665) by Johannes Vermeer (1632-75)] Ever want to do this to a beloved painting before a museum guard said, don’t touch? [Solman is shown about to rub his hand across Burial at Sea (1842) by British artist J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851; English Romantic painter, printmaker, and watercolorist)]. Well, I did from the time I was a kid. And now I actually can feel the paint.

This is an art tech story prompted by entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan.

Jerry Kaplan, Stanford University: [Walking across a plaza with Solman and a small, wheeled, sort of R2D2 robot in a tie and hat.] It’s like a jackrabbit, but it’s a robot.

[Jerry Kaplan (b. 1952) is an American computer scientist, author, and entrepreneur who currently serves as a Lecturer and Research Affiliate at Stanford University. He is a prominent figure in the field of Artificial Intelligence and has been a significant contributor to the Silicon Valley ecosystem for over three decades.

[Kaplan holds multiple academic and research positions across various departments at Stanford. He is a Lecturer and Research Affiliate who teaches courses on the social and economic impact of Artificial Intelligence; a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics (CodeX) within the Stanford Law School; a visiting lecturer in the Computer Science department, focusing on the philosophy and ethics of AI; and a strategic director associated with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

[Kaplan is a recognized entrepreneur and author who co-founded four Silicon Valley startups, including GO Corporation (pioneering tablet computing) and Onsale.com. He is known for his work on tablet computers, natural language systems, and AI, publishing books like Startup, Humans Need Not Apply, Artificial Intelligence, and Generative Artificial Intelligence.]

Paul Solman: Kaplan has gurued me and you through the emerging high-tech world for a decade.

Jerry Kaplan: Mary, what do you feel about your own death?

Mary, A.I.: I guess, technically, I cannot die since I am a digital being.

Paul Solman: But what’s the art angle?

Jerry Kaplan: My mother died last year at the ripe old age of 99. And one of her most prized possessions was a painting of me and my little sister from what was an unknown artist at the time by the name of Wayne Thiebaud. And the picture was titled Children of the ’60s [1967].

[Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) was an American painter known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects, such as pies, cakes, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs, as well as for his landscapes and figure paintings. Thiebaud is regarded as one of the United States’ most beloved and recognizable artists.

[He is associated with the Pop Art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, though he slightly predated the classic pop artists, producing his early works of this style in the fifties and sixties. Thiebaud created his precursor works to Pop Art in the mid-to-late 1950s; the classic American Pop Art movement exploded in the early 1960s.]

Paul Solman: But now it’s worth millions [between $1 million and $1.5 million].

Jerry Kaplan: Well, what do we do with it? There are two of us, me and my sister. And while we would both like to have a copy, the truth is that it’s just too valuable.

Paul Solman: So, unlike King Solomon’s split the baby in two, he came up with a high-tech solution.

Jerry Kaplan: This is an exact, precise reproduction at a micro level.

[It turns out that the Kaplans didn’t keep the portrait. The painting was sold at Christie’s New York during their Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 15 May 2024 for $1,071,000.]

Paul Solman: Of the Kaplans’ Thiebaud and of this lady a half-a-millennium young [view of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (aka: La Gioconda, ca. 1503-06)]. The technology was first used to analyze her condition.

Patrick Robinson, Arius Technology: Nobody expected these paintings to last for 500 years. Particularly with the Mona Lisa, there are stress factors and twisting of wood and things that are certainly occurring over time.

[I have a post, “Conserving Modern Art” (11 December 2018), that discusses the effects of time on works of art. The topic is modern art and the experimental media used to create it, but the general coverage applies to classic works and traditional materials as well.]

Paul Solman: The surface, for example, has been cracking for centuries. And eventually, says Patrick Robinson of Arius Technology [b. 1959 or 1960; Canadian; finance and investment manager], to preserve it will mean to store it safely away. Same for other time-honored paintings and frescoes, van Goghs [Vincent van Gogh (1853-90); Dutch Post-Impressionist painter], Monets [Claude Monet (1840-1926); French painter; founder of Impressionism], and other works of the faraway past.

Patrick Robinson: You can imagine cities that are affected by water levels and things like that and destruction. We intend to be at the center point of those restorations or those historical archiving, if you will.

Paul Solman: And be rescuing art from disaster, says Arius adviser Marco Soriano [b. 1980; entrepreneur and economist].

Marco Soriano, CEO, Soriano Group and Family Office: Pulling the fire that took place in California [Los Angeles County and Ventura County, 7-31 January 2025], where billions of dollars of artwork were burned and not insured properly were lost. The National Museum of Brazil [Rio de Janeiro] also was destroyed [by fire; 2 September 2018], multiple masterpieces that had been there destroyed.

So we would like to preserve that part of culture of our civilization that can easily be erased if it’s not protected properly.

Paul Solman: So how exactly to preserve works forever? You can now create a high-tech laser scanner, apply it to the art.

Patrick Robinson: We scan them to 10 microns, which is the same width of a 10th of the human hair or similar to an actual size of a blood vessel.

Paul Solman: Arius engineering head Roland Dela Cuesta [b. ca. 1971 or 1972; Arius VP of Engineering and Image Production].

Roland Dela Cuesta, Arius Technology: You can see the fine cracks, you can see paint strokes to the level of a three-sable hairbrush. And then on top of that, you get the color.

Paul Solman: And besides solving problems like the Kaplan estate or saving the Mona Lisa:

Patrick Robinson: Making it easier for restorations, for insurance, for valuations. You look at The Girl With the Pearl, when that was restored they used a print on the wall of the museum.

Paul Solman: Did people know that it was not the original? Could they tell?

Patrick Robinson: I would – you know what, Paul? I say, universally, anything we do, no one can tell without knowing.

Paul Solman: The scanner was used to make multiples of contemporary artist Stale Amsterdam’s [pseudonym for Dutch artist (whose birthdate and birth name are unrevealed) known for creating hyper-realistic portraits] portrait of Salvador Dali.

[Stale Amsterdam's portrait of Salvador Dalí is one of his most prominent works. He created multiple original versions of the Dalí portrait, but the 2021 version was the primary subject of a 3D scanning project in London.

[In a major collaboration with Arius Technology and alta Creative Studio, the 2021 original was digitally scanned in ultra-high resolution to create a series of Elegraph monoprints. These prints use “elevated printing technology” to recreate the actual texture and physical depth of the original's 40+ paint layers.]

Patrick Robinson: Just like Andy Warhol [1928-87; American artist and filmmaker] did editions of tomato soup cans with a red background, with a blue background, with a white background, whatever it might be.

Paul Solman: On YouTube, adviser Marco Soriano, an electric motorcycle maker, doesn’t strike you as an old master buff, but he joined the Arius team to expand the business.

Marco Soriano: If you’re the buyer of that piece of art, of artifact, it needs to have some kind of a record so that you can understand what it is. So our technology would, in a certain way, authenticate if that’s real or not.

Paul Solman: He’s also nuts over Piero della Francesca’s [c. 1415-92; Italian painter, mathematician, and geometrist of the Early Renaissance] 15th century Resurrection [fresco; c. 1463-65; in Sansepolcro, then in the Republic of Florence].

Marco Soriano: When I saw it for the first time, it almost made me cry. It has such a strong and meaningful value to all Christianity, to all Catholics in the world.

Paul Solman: Arius is scanning the already damaged fresco.

Adrian Randolph, Northwestern University: That really is a cultural historical object which, spreading it around the world, having other people who can’t travel to Central Italy, in the case of – Italy in the case of Piero della Francesca, that sounds good to me.

Paul Solman: Art historian Adrian Randolph [b. ca. 1964 or 1965] does see potential downsides.

Adrian Randolph: What happens when you have many, many objects which are reproduced? The value of the original might decline. So I assume there could be some sort of financial, what, disruption to the market.

Paul Solman: And aside from the economics is the issue of how we experience art.

Adrian Randolph: Even just in terms of a cultural artifact, does it change its status, which is fascinating and a little destabilizing, I think, for those of us who have always emphasized students and experts going to see the things on site.

Paul Solman: Amy Herman [b. ca. 1965 or 1966], an art historian and educator, cites a German philosopher for inspiration.

Amy Herman, Art Historian and Educator: As Walter Benjamin [1892-1940; German philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist] said so long ago, he said, there never is a perfect copy of a work of art. No such perfect copy ever exists because it’s missing its presence and its time and its place.

[Benjamin articulated this concept in his seminal 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit).]

Paul Solman: Herman too argues that the way we view original art is a singular experience.

Amy Herman: I think that this process of using this 3-D scanner opens our eyes, literally and figuratively, to things that we couldn’t see before, augments our appreciation, but it doesn’t necessarily change that immediacy, that experience of sitting in a Sansepolcro or sitting in Frick’s galleries [Frick Collection; art museum in New York City] and having that one-on-one with the work of art.

Paul Solman: But here in my house, this laser-scanned Burial at Sea by British painter J. M. W. Turner is a pretty singular experience too, and a tangible one.

For the “PBS News Hour,” Paul Solman.

[Paul Solman has been a correspondent for the PBS News Hour since 1985, mainly covering business and economics.

[Diane Lincoln Estes is a producer at PBS News Hour, where she works on economics stories for Making Sen$e, a weekly business and economics broadcast feature every Thursday on the News Hour and online presence updated daily.]