
When planning to visit a museum, one usually expects to get to know the exhibits and the artifacts. In an art museum, one hopes to meet with a rich and deep world of artwork, but often feels alone standing in front of an object that always speaks a different language, even if it belongs to contemporary art. Exhibition labels, whether brief or detailed, fail to capture all aspects of art, and each museum guide seems to have its unique opinion about the work. That fluidity in interpreting artwork is the most prominent when meeting the same object in different exhibitions and different contexts.
Thanks to Gaudio AI, an audio art guide application prepared by curators, visitors can experience profound museum tours. The application draws from carefully curated resources: selected literature both historical and contemporary, visual and audio materials, writings, and archival materials including photographs. Art historians, curators, and other art professionals use these materials to craft engaging stories and theories about art. This helps visitors recognize the complex layers of artwork and discover different ways of seeing art.
Panofsky’s Three Layers: The Foundation of Gaudio’s Approach
One can be surprised knowing how rich in meaning is even the first layer of an artwork, i.e. its bare materiality, and how exciting could be to recognize formal changes as we walk from one artwork to another. What role does AI play in recognizing art's physical properties and their associated meanings? How can AI help the basic museum experience become more personalized nd exciting, leaving visitors satisfied, moved, and confident in their knowledge of materials, forms, and its historical meaning?

Gaudio’s AI app is based on Panofsky’s concept of three layers of art analysis. Each person can choose whether they want to learn more about the physical (material, formal) layer of the artwork, about the iconographic layer (reading symbolic forms and connecting them to sources), or about the meaning of artwork found in its connection to the time it was made (connecting art to certain concepts of that time, events, cultural climate). Gaudio makes the journey of learning and recognizing layers easier by creating imaginative personas that could present the knowledge from different perspectives, for example, from the position of an artist, conservator, art curator or art historian, and a storyteller (humanist) persona interested in merging all the knowledge in a wider context appropriate to the work in question.
The visitor chooses which persona will lead him/her to the world of knowing the artwork presented, based on its preferences and interests. Regardless of which persona the visitor chooses, they should keep in mind that each digital persona’s narrative is carefully prepared by art professionals. Visitors feel safe and free to choose the way they prefer to learn, knowing that the knowledge and insights they gain by using Gaudio’s AI application are guided by living people, who understand art’s complex meshes of meanings, who enjoy proposing discussions, who do their research, who are working closely with and on artists, and whose questions are never dull, mechanical, or boring.
Understanding Artwork Materiality: Goya’s ‘Two Old Men Eating
Let us imagine ourselves standing in the Prado Museum, in front of Francisco de Goya’s “Two Old Men Eating” (1819-1823). This work is from the series of his so-called Black paintings, once adorning the inner walls of Goya’s house that was located near Madrid. When visitors approach this artwork, they immediately feel its expressive power. However, the image's nature, meaning, and context often remain mysterious. Even the most attentive visitors, studying the finest details, find the piece enigmatic. This is where our digital museum guide provides assistance. If a visitor, for example, chooses to learn more about the technical nature of the artwork, one is primarily choosing to know more about the process of making this artwork, the result based on its material being, and the consequences of adjusting/changing of artwork’s physical appearance. One is then interested in “artistic perspective”, the perspective of the conservator, or anyone closely working on artwork’s appearance, so is naturally choosing one of many digital personas who can guide him/her in that direction.
The visitor will learn that the artwork was painted directly on a wall inside of Goya’s house and that it was transferred to canvas years later, losing something of its original color. One will learn that this piece was not intended to be seen as such. The AI guide here focuses on enhancing the way visitors understand art in general. After claiming that the artwork is not intended to be seen the way we see it now, the interactive museum guide, in the form of a chosen “persona”, asks for a moment to reflect on that feeling. It later asks questions, like: do you know that the majority of artworks before the 19th century were never intended to be looked at the way we see them now? It can help visitors understand that seeing art as something to be seen (in public spaces, available to all) is a modern concept, that emerged only in past centuries. The museum audio guide here explains that the introduction to the concept of art as we know it today coincides both with the development of a museum as an institution, and the notion of art as “a kind of representation that is purposive in itself”, to quote Kant, so from the 18th century onwards.
Goya’s idea to paint directly on a wall of his house was not usual at that time. Gaudio’s AI persona can ask a visitor to think about the reason for doing so. Artists sometimes make paintings only “for their eyes”, but they choose more “private” techniques and forms like print and drawings and smaller scale paintings, as A. Schulz proposed in his book on Goya’s prints. Gaudio’s Museum App is capable of guiding visitors through world-famous examples of private interior paintings, from Pompeii murals to Jean Cocteau’s drawings in the villa Santo Sospir. This is just another path to learn about the first, material layer of the artwork in question.
Connecting Art Across Time: AI Guide Gives Insights into Historical and Modern Art
Visitors could choose another path to learn more about the technical qualities of this specific artwork. One could choose to focus on light and color, for example. Gaudio AI app can ask a visitor to enlarge details of the painting to see how Goya painted light. What is the color that stands for light? What makes the dark? The museum guide will ask a visitor to see if the path from light to darkness goes smoothly, gradually, or in a disruptive way. Using the Gaudio app, visitors will be able to recognize how contrasts are an important part of Goya’s work, and that sometimes his brushstrokes are given independently from their function (to reveal an object). In Goya’s “Two Old Men Eating”, one single stroke of color (light) is what stands for a plate – here the AI guide asks visitors to take a moment to meditate upon this fact. How does our brain recognize objects, according to what we see (the single line of color) or according to what we know (the plate)? How logic is shaping senses? What senses gave to logic? Gaudio’s audio guide now turns to the theory of shapes, such as Arnheim’s, to understand why we see what we see, but gives space for a visitor to think about it before it focuses on literature-prepared answers, selected by curators as important. The pause for a reflection matters.
The chosen digital persona turns focus to that golden surface that, seemingly without any sense, stands as an arm of the right person presented in the work, but now for a different reason. At this point, the AI art guide helps visitors understand the modernity of Goya, and the freedom of his art. Colors, lights, and shades work as independent parts of the image, each bearing its own expression. The AI guide then makes a connection to Van Gogh's "The Potato Eaters" (1885), displayed at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This work shares a similar theme. The pre-iconographic layer spans from technical aspects ('how it was made') to what we observe in our everyday experience. At this moment, reinforced by AI’s connection, we tend to see how two different images, presenting the same theme, differ, and at what point are those similar. Goya shows expressive, dark, maybe symbolic art, while Van Gogh refers to social meanings.
On a material level, on which we are still focused, we follow that art form independence: at Van Gogh’s we see the independent bluish circle, standing for a “glass”; one monolith black surface presenting a woman’s back; free brushstrokes, one next to each other, building the face of each person. We see how modernism learned to speak, from Goya to Van Gogh, to, Cezanne, where the image is no longer built by lights and darks but entirely from color surfaces standing (opposing and complementing) one next to another. Examples introduced to visitors by the Gaudio museum guide provoke realizing different dimensions of art’s materiality while tracing key elements through art history.
Gaudio’s Art Guide – from Education to Reflection
As we can see, Gaudio’s digital personas, presenting the knowledge prepared to visitors by art professionals themselves, are not only capable of showing different aspects of artworks’ materiality but also of providing insights into different interpretations of those aspects, based on specialized literature and primary sources scholars use for their research. In this specific case, the formal qualities we mentioned can be interpreted from Hughes’s standpoint saying that this kind of Goya’s “free” formal approach means breaking away from traditional painting, seeing Goya’s art as an anticipation of the art of Expressionism. Many other theories, like Junquera’s, tend to see Goya’s use of black colors and dark palette as a sign of the artist’s depression and isolation. Those are just two possible sources of interpretations, which the AI guide is learning from, in order to give visitors as many options and opinions on a specific topic and artwork. The important fact is that this museum guide is here not only to present valuable and authentic interpretations, but also to prepare visitors for moments of reflection: the interactive visitor guide has learned to make pauses, to guide the eye, and to provoke thoughts. But also, to make space for moments of silence, sometimes asking questions without giving answers, aiming at co-creating open stories, that start and end at the bare being of the artwork – now close to everyone.
LITERATURE
Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939.
Schulz, Andrew. Goya’s Caprichos: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.
4. Hughes, Robert. Goya. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
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