The problem

The records are scattered. The questions are urgent.

The records needed to trace an artwork’s history are scattered across thousands of archives, museums, auction catalogues, and databases around the world. Whether a work left its home during wartime, under colonial rule, or through illicit excavation and trade, the evidence of its journey is written in many languages, often handwritten, poorly scanned, or never digitized, and the sources rarely connect to one another. A single provenance question can take a researcher weeks or months of searching by hand. For the Nazi era alone, the evidence is spread across 102 separate databases and archives, in eleven languages, with no common key joining one source to another.

AI can now help with exactly these tasks: reading and translating historical documents, recognizing names, places, and objects across sources, and connecting records that were never linked before. Ardelia puts that capability in the hands of the professionals who do this work.

Our story

Ardelia began as an academic project at Santa Clara University. Michael Santoro, a professor at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business who works on business ethics and human rights, was moved by a friend’s effort to trace a family artwork stolen during World War II. His friend could afford the research and legal help; many families cannot.

Santoro asked colleagues, including Michele Samorani, to test whether AI could help researchers search the records of art looted during the Nazi era. The first version was simple: plain-language questions put to a single database, the records of the works that passed through the Jeu de Paume in occupied Paris.

The project drew wide attention, including coverage by NPR, Smithsonian Magazine, and Bonjour Paris, and valuable feedback from provenance experts. They said the idea was promising but that real research needs many sources, access to primary documents, and tools built around how professionals actually work. Ardelia Inc. was founded to build exactly that.

Our name

Rose Valland kept the record. Ardelia Hall used it.
Our tool is named for the second half of that story, and it runs on the first.

Rose Valland (1898–1980)

From 1941 to 1944, while the Nazis processed more than 20,000 looted works through the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, its curator Rose Valland secretly recorded what arrived, whose it had been, and where it was sent. Her records helped locate some 60,000 works.

Ardelia Ripley Hall (1899–1979)

Ardelia Hall was a scholar of Asian art, a graduate of Smith College, and a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, before the Second World War. In 1946 she became Fine Arts and Monuments Adviser to the U.S. Department of State, and for the next sixteen years she was the driving force behind America’s postwar restitution of looted art.

Working through correspondence and a card index, one object at a time, she traced missing works and saw them returned. In 1952 she personally returned a Rubens portrait of St. Catherine, missing since the war, to the museum in Düsseldorf. Under her leadership, the State Department helped return more than 4,000 works of art to 14 countries.

Her files, preserved at the National Archives as the Ardelia Hall Collection, remain a foundation of provenance research today. Ardelia is named in her honor.

Sources U.S. Department of State, “Ardelia Hall and the Monuments Men and Women”; U.S. National Archives, Holocaust-Era Assets, Records Concerning the Central Collecting Points (“Ardelia Hall Collection”) (archives.gov); French Ministry of Culture, on Rose Valland’s role in the recovery of 60,000 works (culture.gouv.fr); Bonjour Paris, “The Monuments Woman: The French Spy Who Rescued Stolen Art.”