New research using artificial intelligence has challenged the long-held belief that El Greco's altarpiece *The Baptism of Christ* was largely painted by his son and workshop assistants. A machine-learning model called Patch, developed by researchers at Western Reserve University, analyzed the painting's microscopic surface texture and found underlying connections suggesting El Greco himself painted the majority of the work, with only a small region at the bottom attributed to other hands.
The findings, published in *Science Advances*, demonstrate how AI can provide new, data-driven insights into centuries-old attribution debates. The technology, which analyzes brushwork texture without needing pre-labeled training data, has significant potential to reassess authorship in Renaissance and other workshop-era paintings where detailed records are scarce, moving art historical analysis beyond stylistic observation.