Can AI help identify the sitters in historical portraits? This is the question pondered by an interdisciplinary project as well as an exhibition that opened this month at Geneva’s Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH), showcasing a dozen 1762 chalk drawings of the family of Austria’s Empress Maria Theresa by the 18th-century artist Jean-Étienne Liotard.

Twenty years ago, when Catriona Seth was preparing to publish a book about Marie-Antoinette, she chose a beloved childhood portrait of the storied French queen by the 18th-century artist Jean-Étienne Liotard as the book’s cover illustration. Only years later, while researching the early life of this infamously decapitated royal, did she realize something wasn’t quite right. The young lady depicted in that chalk drawing has the chivalric medal of the Order of the Starry Cross pinned to her ruffled pink dress; Marie-Antoinette too received that medal but hadn’t yet in 1762 when Liotard (1702–1789) was in Vienna producing a series of portraits of the many children of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.