British academics from the University of Nottingham and Bradford have announced that they have used artificial intelligence facial recognition technology to determine that a painting named "Brecy Tondo," previously attributed to an unknown artist, is likely to have been created by the renowned Renaissance artist, Raphael.

The academics compared the faces in the painting with those in Raphael's "The Sistine Madonna" and found that the similarities were 97%. They also performed pigment analysis on the "Brecy Tondo" and found that the painting's features are typical of Renaissance work.

The technology used was developed by professor Hassan Ugail from the University of Bradford, who said that the deep neural network of the technology can identify items with higher accuracy than human eyes, uses a deep neural network to filter data through multiple filters and can identify with a higher degree of accuracy. While the similarity in the faces of the Madonnas in the two paintings was 97%, the comparison of the babies' faces yielded a similarity of 86%.

This is a significant discovery as Raphael, known for his Madonna depictions, is one of the "grand masters" of the Renaissance period alongside Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.