Prof. Dr. Anna Tummers is Professor of Early Modern Art History at Ghent University. Her research focuses on connoisseurship, forgeries, art theory, early modern cultural history, the technical analysis of paintings, and digital tools for art analysis. She is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project ARTDETECT: A New Connoisseurship: Smart Ways to Detect Forgeries (ERC Consolidator Grant 101088056, 2024-2028).
Previously, she worked as a research assistant in the Print Room, The Royal Library at Windsor Castle, England (1999-2000), as an assistant curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (2000-2003), as an assistant professor in training and part-time lecturer at the University of Amsterdam (2003-2008), as a curator of Old Master paintings at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem (2008-2020), and as a lecturer in Early Modern Art and Art Theory at Leiden University (2020-2023). She has led and co-led two Dutch Research Council (NWO) projects on Frans Hals attribution issues, evaluating various technical research methods and data visualisation tools: Frans Hals or not Frans Hals (2016-2018) and 21st Century Connoisseurship (2018-2022, co-led with Prof. Robert Erdmann). She has published twelve books and more than 250 articles and catalogue 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 2024 he was Senior Scientist at the Rijksmuseum. Since 2014 he has also been 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.
With Contributions by:
Andrei Anisimov
Silvia Centeno
Joris Dik
Nouchka De Keyser
Roger Groves
Babette Hartwieg
Erma Hermens
Katja Kleinert
Annelies van Loon
Dorothy Mahon
Claudia Laurenze-Landsberg
Vassilis Papadakis
Arie Wallert
Marie-Noelle Grison