Before he became famous, Pablo Picasso didn't always have money for art materials, so, like other struggling artists, he'd paint over existing canvases to create new works, thus concealing the older painting.
In 2010, X-rays revealed a work hidden beneath Picasso's 1903 oil painting The Blind Man's Meal, considered one of the most important works from the artist's expressionist Blue Period from 1901 to 1904.
According to the German News Agency (dpa), it's a painting of a nude woman, dubbed The Lonesome Crouching Nude.
Researchers from the University College London re-created the painting using an original algorithm that studied dozens of Picasso's paintings and trained itself in the Spanish artist's style.
Using the X-rayed image as a guide, AI applied its understanding of Picasso to the full-size, full-color replica.
"It's quite eerie seeing the brushstrokes, the color and the way in which lights reflects off the work. It's a beautiful piece," said George Cann, one of two UCL Ph.D. researchers who brought the 20th century piece back to life with modern tools.
