When masked thieves on mopeds sped away from the Louvre Museum in Paris with priceless jewels from Napoleon III’s wife, the world stopped to watch. The drama had everything – speed, spectacle, and shock value. But while theft makes headlines, the quieter, more pervasive crime in the art world today isn’t stealing masterpieces. It’s making them.
Across Europe, authorities are unravelling webs of forgery that stretch across the continent, and throughout the world. In Italy, for example, investigators recently dismantled workshops turning out counterfeits of Dalí, Banksy and Picasso, and uncovered another 70 fake canvases attributed to Rembrandt and Pissarro in a Roman apartment.
These aren’t amateur imitations: they come complete with falsified certificates, auction histories, and gallery stamps. Forgeries, unlike thieves, don’t need ladders or cinematic getaways. They only need to look convincing enough to hang on a wall.
But as deception grows more sophisticated, so do the tools to expose it – and some of these are Swiss.
In Zurich, Art Recognition AG has built an AI trained to spot the invisible rhythms of an artist’s hand. Feed it a simple photograph and, within days, the system delivers a probability score of authenticity – a data-driven verdict that once took months of expert debate. It’s already challenged museums on attributions once thought untouchable, including London’s contested Samson and Delilah, long credited to Rubens.
Meanwhile, Lausanne-based MATIS brings the science of light to art. Its handheld multispectral camera peers beneath the surface, mapping pigments and revealing hidden underdrawings, the kind of ghostly sketches that betray whether a painting is genuine inspiration or careful imitation.
And at ETH Zurich, scientists are turning to atomic history itself: measuring trace isotopes of carbon-14 left by Cold War nuclear tests to determine whether a paint’s oil binder could really date from the 1600s – or from a forger’s studio in 1986. Though the process has been around for decades, it was mostly thought too destructive of the artwork, until ETH Zurich successfully managed to reduce the necessary testing sample sizes to a tiny strand of canvas or microscopic paint particle.
Together, these Swiss innovations offer a practical response to a global forgery industry worth billions, using light, data, and chemistry to uncover what signatures and certificates can’t.
In an era of deepfakes, artificial companions and counterfeit everything, perhaps authenticity has become the rarest material of all. But these Swiss art sleuths are showing us that the genuine article is out there, if only you know how to look.