Barthélémy Jobert is so engrossed in the 19th century that he takes an expansive view of it: For him it began intellectually in the 1760s and ran into the 1920s. A leading art historian in Paris and former president of what is now Sorbonne University, he is particularly expert in the work of Eugène Delacroix, the French Romantic artist best known for his 1830 painting “Liberty Leading the People,” a stridently anti-royalist work depicting citizens rising up against a despot. Now, Jobert will be getting a significant boost in his ability to use artificial intelligence and other 21st-century technologies in his yearslong quest to explore Delacroix’s art and resolve mysteries about its attribution.
This week, Schmidt Sciences, a nonprofit founded by the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, plans to announce a new grantmaking program that will underwrite Jobert’s project, known as Digital Delacroix, with funding thought to be in the high six figures. Jobert aims to digitize and analyze many things Delacroix — his letters and journals, the murals he painted in the second half of his career, even contemporary newspaper accounts of the man and his work — and cross-reference them for scholarly purposes while putting them online for others to explore. The grant from Schmidt will allow him to obtain more computing power and augment his current team of six by hiring a couple of researchers trained in both art history and A.I. — a rare breed, even in France.
For Schmidt Sciences, Digital Delacroix is the first of a projected 10 to 15 grant recipients that will receive a total of $10 million to apply A.I. to research in the humanities. Outlays are expected to range from less than $100,000 to as much as $1.5 million. (Schmidt Sciences would not provide an exact figure for its support of Digital Delacroix.) Sorbonne University made a brief announcement of the organization’s involvement in February, shortly after an international A.I. summit was held in Paris, but its role has not been detailed until now.
For Jobert, it’s the culmination of a passion he’s had for almost 40 years, ever since he was a young teaching fellow at Harvard. He was standing in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts before Delacroix’s “The Lamentation,” an 1848 canvas that shows mourners surrounding the body of Christ after the crucifixion, when he was struck by a figure in the foreground: John the Baptist, draped in the red cloak that often symbolizes his beheading. “I cannot explain why,” Jobert said in a video interview, “but for me, this red cloak is the image of soul.”
At this point, Jobert has assembled an informal consortium of French institutions that includes units of the Ministry of Culture and the National Center for Scientific Research as well as a center for the humanities, a center for A.I. and other agencies at Sorbonne University. Work on digitizing the texts is well underway, so Jobert’s attention is currently centered on the murals Delacroix painted for the grand buildings occupied by the French Parliament, in rooms that are almost never open to the public.
