A Photo of a Woman With a Scroll Helped Police Find a Painting Missing for 20 Years
A photograph of a young woman holding a scroll helped Italian police track down a 17th-century painting that had been missing for 20 years. The match was made by an artificial intelligence (AI) program that compares images for the police.
The program is called SWOADS, short for Stolen Works of Art Detection System. It is run by the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, a unit of Italy's Carabinieri, the national police force with a squad dedicated to stolen art and antiquities. The unit has used the AI algorithm since 2023, according to ArtNews.
The painting shows Saint Agnese. It was taken from Virgo Potens, a church in Sulmona, a town in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. In the original work, the saint cradles a small white lamb and holds a palm branch. Later, the lamb was painted over with a scroll carrying Latin text.
The match came from a visit to a fair. In October 2024, officers went to Mercanteinfiera, an antiques fair, and uploaded photographs into the police art crime database. One of those pictures showed a young woman holding a scroll. SWOADS flagged it as a match to the stolen Saint Agnese.
The system does not work by reading names or labels. It looks for hidden visual fingerprints, which pair similarities in shades of colour with rough outlines of shapes. The system was developed by Salvatore Rapicavoli, an IT engineer who joined the art crime team in 2023.
The recovered portrait has gone back to Virgo Potens, the church it was taken from, ArtNews reports. The BBC describes the painting as having been missing for two decades before the AI match.
Recovery is not new for the police. Italian police have kept a database of looted cultural artefacts since 1969, the BBC reports. SWOADS has recovered more than 300 large paintings and statues, and more than 165,000 small objects such as coins, letters and medals. Those objects are worth over US$200 million in total, ArtNews reports.
The Carabinieri publish an official page about the SWOADS project, which sets out how the system is used.
For a small church in Abruzzo, the story ends with a painting back on its walls. For the police, it is a sign that a photograph from a fair can lead to a work that vanished two decades ago.
