Visscher's Royal Bible (seen here bound in a 1672 Swart KJV) was a stunning series of around 130 two-page Biblical engravings printed on Royal-sized paper, each a massive 24" x 15": a so-called "picture Bible" designed to be bound on its own or inside a printed Bible (typically a large folio King James Version). Among the sources it drew from was Jode's 1585 Thesaurus, arguably the first true "picture bible" (Durer's series was not strictly biblical and Holbein's was of a slightly different vein) and a landmark copperplate reference guide to the Old Masters paintings of the era. Only a small number of complete copies of each are these landmark Bibles is known to survive today.
A number of Visscher plates were reworkings of images from the Jode, either taking a one-page Jode image and expanding it to fill two full pages or combining multiple one-page images from the Jode into a single double-page Visscher plate and filling in additional detail to blend them together. Yet, with 130 engravings in the Visscher and at least 330 in the Jode, how can we possibly compare the two volumes to try and identify these reworkings at scale? Could Gemini help?
Here we perform a small-scale test, providing Gemini a gallery of images that include both an enlargement (single to double-page) and combination (two single-page images reworked into a single double-page) example, along with a set of unrelated images that include similar elements to test whether Gemini is able to correctly identify the overlaps and also not incorrectly connect unrelated images that merely share similar elements. Gemini 3.1 Pro correctly identifies and describes both reworkings and rejects the unrelated images, suggesting significant potential for museums interested in identifying image reuse across their archives. Future experiments will scale up these comparison tests and demonstrate incorporating image embeddings to allow archive-scale analysis across tens of millions of images.
This was the prompt used:
Below is a collection of scanned images from historical Bibles. In some cases, images were reworked into a slightly different form for a different image or multiple images were combined to make another. See if you can find any of those examples in the collection below. Examine the images extremely carefully.
This was Gemini's assessment:
Based on a careful examination of the collection, there are indeed a few fascinating examples of images being reworked, mirrored, and combined! Here are the instances where these historical prints intersect:
1. The Spies of Canaan (Images 3 and 5)
These two images depict the exact same scene—two men carrying a massive cluster of grapes on a pole (representing the spies returning from the Promised Land)—but they are mirrored versions of one another.
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- Image 5 shows the leading man on the left side of the frame, holding his staff in his right hand, stepping forward with his left foot.
- Image 3 is the mirrored copy. The leading man is now on the right side of the frame, holding his staff in his left hand, stepping forward with his right foot.
- Historical Context: This often happened in early printmaking when an engraver copied an existing print by carving it directly as they saw it onto a new copper plate. When the new plate was inked and printed onto paper, the resulting image was reversed. You can even see the publisher's mark "Visscher excudebat" faintly on the wooden plank in Image 3, indicating Claes Jansz Visscher likely copied the older plate by Gerard de Jode (credited at the bottom of Image 5).
2. The Jonah Composite (Images 1, 4, and 6)
This is the most complex and interesting example in the set. Image 4 is a large, panoramic composite that combines two completely separate standalone prints (Images 1 and 6) into a single, continuous timeline of the Jonah narrative.
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- The Left Half of Image 4 (Jonah spat onto land): This scene is an exact mirrored copy of the standalone print in Image 1.
- In Image 1, the sea monster is on the left, facing right, spitting Jonah onto the right shore.
- In the composite Image 4, the engraver flipped the scene: Jonah is on the left, crawling out, while the monster is on the right, facing left. Even the background city and lighthouse have been mirrored.
- The Right Half of Image 4 (Jonah thrown to the whale): This scene is a direct copy of the standalone print in Image 6.
- Unlike the left side, this half was not mirrored. It retains the exact same orientation as Image 6. In both versions, the ship (with its distinct elephant figurehead) is on the left, and the men are tossing Jonah off the right side of the vessel directly into the waiting jaws of the sea monster below.
- The Left Half of Image 4 (Jonah spat onto land): This scene is an exact mirrored copy of the standalone print in Image 1.
By stitching a mirrored version of the ending (Image 1) together with the original orientation of the beginning (Image 6), the publisher of Image 4 cleverly created a sweeping, two-page narrative landscape out of existing assets!
Below you can see the complete set of images that were provided to Gemini.
The first pairing is the Visscher Royal's reworking of the Jode's single-page image into a two-page spread. The image is almost identical, but has been reworked slightly to greatly enlarge it:
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Finally, let's throw in some additional unrelated images that feature some similar visual elements to make sure Gemini doesn't just find spurious connections among unrelated images:
