{"id":1970,"date":"2026-10-29T09:46:18","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T09:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/?p=1970"},"modified":"2026-10-29T09:46:18","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T09:46:18","slug":"italian-police-use-ai-art-theft-software-to-find-loot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/italian-police-use-ai-art-theft-software-to-find-loot\/","title":{"rendered":"Italian Police Use AI Art Theft Software to Find Loot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"p-rc_1cbe790e515694ca-100\" data-path-to-node=\"9\"><span class=\"citation-303 citation-end-303\">Italian police recovered a 17th-century painting stolen two decades ago after deploying new AI art theft software at an October 2024 antiquities fair in Parma.<\/span> The recovery of the heavily disguised masterpiece demonstrates how law enforcement is increasingly automating the hunt for plundered cultural heritage.<\/p>\n<p id=\"p-rc_1cbe790e515694ca-101\" data-path-to-node=\"10\"><span class=\"citation-302 citation-end-302\">The Stolen Works of Art Detection System (Swoads) flagged a painting of a woman in an aquamarine and red dress holding a half-unrolled scroll.<\/span> Investigators seized the artwork the following day. <span class=\"citation-301 citation-end-301\">It turned out to be Saint Agnese, stolen from the Virgo<a href=\"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/\"> Potens<\/a> church in Sulmona on August 11, 2004. Thieves had painted over the saint&#8217;s halo, palm branch, and lamb, replacing the animal with a scroll to evade traditional keyword searches.<\/span><\/p>\n<p id=\"p-rc_1cbe790e515694ca-102\" data-path-to-node=\"11\"><span class=\"citation-300 citation-end-300\">Because the theft occurred more than 20 years ago, Italian law prevented prosecution.<\/span><span class=\"\"> The Naples antiquities dealer who possessed the painting likely inherited it through a family business and knew little about its actual provenance.<\/span><\/p>\n<p id=\"p-rc_1cbe790e515694ca-103\" data-path-to-node=\"13\"><span class=\"citation-299 citation-end-299\">Conceived in 2020 and officially introduced in November 2023, Swoads looks past superficial alterations.<\/span> <span class=\"citation-298 citation-end-298\">It matches the underlying visual fingerprints of an artwork, such as specific color shade combinations and rough silhouettes.<\/span> <span class=\"citation-297 citation-end-297\">This structural matching allows the system to identify pieces of a painting that were chopped up and sold separately, a common fate for large altarpieces.<\/span><\/p>\n<p id=\"p-rc_1cbe790e515694ca-104\" data-path-to-node=\"14\"><span class=\"citation-296 citation-end-296\">The technology operates continuously, crawling e-commerce sites, online catalogues, social media, and the dark web.<\/span><span class=\"\"> It has already helped Italian authorities recover more than 300 large works and 165,<\/span><span class=\"\">000 smaller items,<\/span><span class=\"\"> totaling over \u20ac203 million in value.<\/span> <span class=\"citation-295\">In early 2026, the unit recovered Filippo Palizzi&#8217;s <\/span><i class=\"\" data-path-to-node=\"14\" data-index-in-node=\"308\"><span class=\"citation-295\">Riposo della Pastorella<\/span><\/i><span class=\"citation-295 citation-end-295\">, a painting stolen from a Turin modern art gallery in June 1972, after a routine AI sweep spotted it on an auction house website.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Italian police recovered a 17th-century painting stolen two decades ago after deploying new AI art theft software at an October 2024 antiquities<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1971,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-is-wide","category-life-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1970"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1973,"href":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970\/revisions\/1973"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paperslife.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}