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The Night Watch is a painting completed by Rembrandt in 1642, one of the main attractions of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. A huge work that was originally even bigger. In 1717, in fact, the Night Watch was cut because there was not enough space on the wall intended to house it, between two doors of the Amsterdam City Hall. The painting was thus deprived of a strip of 60 cm on the left, one of 7 cm on the right, one of 22 cm at the upper end and one of 12 cm at the lower end. These four pieces, once eliminated, disappeared into thin air and never found again.
In the mini doc on this page, created by the Rijksmuseum, the long and fascinating work carried out by the museum, starting from 2019, is told to recover the missing parts thanks to new technologies and in particular to artificial neural networks. This is the story of how “Operation Night Watch” was born and how, today, visitors to the Rijksmuseum can admire Rembrandt’s masterpiece in its entirety.