In the basement of Madrid's Reina Sofia museum, a giant robotic machine painstakingly scans a painting by Catalan surrealist artist Joan Miro, slowly snapping hundreds of microscopic shots.

The pictures taken by the machine, which uses infrared and ultraviolet photography, will help experts determine the condition of the 1974 oil on canvas painting called Women, Bird in the Night in unprecedented detail.

The device lets restorers see cracks, scratches and creases as well underlying preparatory sketches and all subsequent touch-ups that would be otherwise undetectable.

"We can see countless details which we could not see with the naked eye," said Humberto Duran, 47, the restoration computer technician who oversaw the design of the robot.

"With this Miro work we have already seen a series of touch-ups and stains that were completely hidden," added Duran, wearing a white lab coat as he sat before the computer he uses to control the machine.

The robot has been nicknamed "Pablito" since the first work it tackled was the modern art museum's top draw - Pablo Picasso's immense canvas Guernica, a depiction of the carnage of the Spanish Civil War.

The machine, which is nine meters long and 3.5 meters high and weighs about 1.2 tons when it is assembled at its full size, took 22,000 pictures of Picasso's black-and-white masterpiece last year.

Those images are currently being analyzed by the restoration department at the museum, which received 2.5 million visitors last year.

Since then, the robot has been used on about a dozen other works, mostly by Miro, to help prepare an exhibition of works by the Catalan artist which will travel to the US next year.

"We can know with great precision what state a painting is in, what its layers are like, what problems exist," or simply how the work was created, said the Reina Sofia's head of conservation, Jorge Garcia.

The museum, housed in a remodelled 18th century hospital, which is home to works by Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon, teamed up with Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica to develop the machine, which cost around 150,000 euros ($195,000).

AFP