Earlier this year we demonstrated how Gemini's incredible visual reasoning capabilities could be used to piece together how the 1585 Jode picture Bible's single-page engravings were reworked and combined together to form the double-page engravings of the Visscher Royal a century later. In that case we know from scholarship that the Visscher Royal's imagery was largely drawn from the earlier Jode and thus knew to focus Gemini on identifying which engravings were combined or altered. Here we explore a different question: what if we just load all of the imagery from all of the seminal picture Bibles through time in batches into Gemini and ask it to identify highly similar image pairings or reworked images? As a first experiment, we loaded a randomized batch of cellphone images of engravings from Pieter de Hondt's 1728 Figures de la Bible and Halma's 1710 reengraving of the Scheits Bible and asked Gemini to compare them all.
Within moments we had a match: Gemini flagged the following two nearly-identical engravings of "The Construction Of the Tabernacle & The Sacred Vessels" and further noted that the second includes the inscription "G. Hoet del." indicating the original source drawing (the image the copperplate engravings reproduce) was a composition by Gerard Hoet tracing them back to their shared source material.
At first glance they appear to be exactly the same image, but a closer inspection identifies countless subtle differences between the landscape orientation of the Halma and the portrait orientation of the Hondt. Most obviously, the bottom engraving truncates the left side of the image, including cutting off half the Menorah. In a more subtle example, look at the distance of the hand of the man at front bottom right from that of the right golden cherubim on the Mercy Seat (the Ark cover) in the first engraving vs the second. Look carefully at the vessels on the ground at bottom left, notice how the left-most vessel is moved to the right and positioned over the one to its right in the bottom engraving versus being to its side in the top engraving. Or the eyes of the two men at front left. Look carefully and you will find countless small differences.
Again, the power of Gemini to look at collection scale to identify hidden patterns and discoveries.
