Frans Hals or not Frans Hals

Prof. Dr.  Anna Tummers holds the position of Professor in Early Modern Art at Ghent University. Prior to this position she was a University Lecturer Early Modern Art and Theory at Leiden University. Since May 2021 she is cluster manager of the newly found cluster Art, Heritage and Science at the Centre for Global Heritage and Development, and member of the Scientific Advisory Board of IPERION HS (a consortium of 24 partners from 23 countries that contributes to establishing a pan-European research infrastructure.

Previously, she worked in the museum world for over 15 years. She was a research assistant at the Print Room, The Royal Library in Windsor Castle, England in 1999-2000, an assistant curator at National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. from 2000-2003, and curator of old master paintings at the Frans Hals Museum from 2008-2020. She is a specialist in authenticity research and has led and co-led two Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) Projects focused around Frans Hals attribution issues, assessing various technical research methods as well as advanced data visualization tools: Frans Hals or not Frans Hals (2016-2018) and 21ST Century Connoisseurship (2018-2022 led together with Prof. Robert Erdmann). She has also done classified research for the French Ministry of Justice for a large court case that will shortly commence in France. She has published a total of 12 books and 251 articles and entries.

Prof. dr. Robert G. Erdmann - Prior to earning his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 2006, Robert Erdmann started a science and engineering software company and worked extensively on solidification and multiscale transport modeling at Sandia National Laboratories. He subsequently joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in the Program in Applied Mathematics and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor, where he worked on multiscale material process modeling and image processing for cultural heritage. In 2011 he was named University of Arizona Teacher of the Year and was named a Faculty Teaching Fellow. After a 2013 Resident Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, he moved permanently to Amsterdam in 2014 to focus full time on combining materials science, imaging science, and computer science to help the world access, understand, and preserve its cultural heritage. From 2014 to 2016, he was Special Professor for the Visualization of Art History at Radboud University. He has been Senior Scientist at the Rijksmuseum since 2014, and is also Full Professor of Conservation Science in the Faculties of Science and of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. He is a recipient of the Europa Nostra Award (Grand Prix), the highest prize for cultural heritage in the European Union for work on the Bosch Research and Conservation Project. He is the inventor of the "Curtain Viewer" visualization technique and has done extensive work applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to huge datasets in cultural heritage, including the creation of a 717 gigapixel image of Rembrandt's Night Watch.

1. FRANS HALS CONNOISSEURSHIP.- 2. SUPPLEMENTING THE EYE: THE TECHNICAL ANALYSIS OF FRANS HALS'S PAINTINGS AND INSIGHTS FROM 17th- CENTURY SOURCES.- 3. THE DIGITALLY ENHANCED EYE: CONNOISSEURSHIP AND SMART TOOLS.- 4. EPILOGUE.