Richard Johnson can see right through the masterpieces of Rembrandt and Van Gogh.
The Cornell University electrical and computer engineering professor is a digital art detective, able to unlock the mysteries of a work's age and authenticity by analysing its underlying canvas or paper.
Using high-resolution X-ray images, the 64-year-old academic can actually determine if paintings came from the same bolt of hand-loomed canvas, each of which has a varying thread density pattern that can be as unique as a fingerprint. Linking multiple pieces of canvas to the same bolt can shore up arguments for authenticity and even put works in chronological order.
It's a valuable service to world class museums that comes through the unlikely crosspollinating of traditional art history and contemporary computer science.
"By mixing the two groups we've been able to do more than either group had been able to do separately studying the paintings," Johnson said in a room full of Dutch paintings at Cornell's Johnson Museum. "We're not trying to replace the art historian, we're trying to extend their reach."
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Johnson is a tech whiz and an art lover - the rare person able to speak with authority about Rembrandt's brush strokes and adaptive feedback systems theory.
He melded the two worlds in 2007 with a stint as an adjunct research fellow at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He began examining high-resolution X-ray images of the canvases used by the 19th century master.
Eventually, Johnson and Rice University professor Don Johnson (no relation) developed digital "weave density maps" of canvases that added computational power to what had been a painstaking process that required scholars to study small samples with magnifying glasses.
"It turns out with the eye, you make mistakes," said Louis van Tilborgh, senior researcher at the Van Gogh museum.
Van Tilborgh sees the weave maps as an important tool in the ongoing work of precisely dating and ordering all of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings.
The technique has also provided evidence to date Diego Velazquez's Sebastian de Morra. A separate analysis of 24 Johannes Vermeer canvases supported the sometimes doubted attribution of one painting and provided fresh evidence to link two paintings at the National Gallery in London as complementary works.
"It's one more technical tool in the box of studying pictures," said Walter Liedtke, curator of European paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, who worked with Johnson on the Vermeers.
"You take this added evidence and you join it with - in the case of the two Vermeers in London - pigment analysis, the iconography of the pictures, whether they were together in their history at earlier dates."
