The life work of Rembrandt — all 317 known paintings, 285 etchings and more than 100 drawings — go on display next week in full-sized digital reproductions that attempt to recreate the works as they emerged from the artist’s studio rather than as they exist today.

In some ways, the high-resolution images are more authentic than the real paintings, said Ernst van de Wetering, a leading Rembrandt scholar who supervised the project.

Employing computer wizardry, pieces of canvas or panel that were sliced off centuries ago have been patched back on. Colours are restored to the vibrancy they had when they came off the master’s brush. Details hidden in darkness because of aging pigments emerge into view.

“The Complete Rembrandt, Life Size” exhibition opens Sunday in the former Amsterdam Stock Exchange building and runs through Sept. 7.

Not everyone is happy with the idea of passing off posters as true art. But even Van de Wetering, who has examined much of 17th century artist’s work with X-rays and microscopes, said he discovered details he had never seen before.

“I got surprises,” he said, as he watched the folds of painted cloth materialise on the computer screen and dark corners highlighted. Organised chronologically, the exhibition brings together work from more than 100 museums and collections around the world to offer viewers “a walk through Rembrandt’s mind,” said the art historian. It follows his 45-year evolution from young painter to possibly the most famous master of his day, and the sudden leaps of inspiration and conceptualisation in between that jolt him to new levels. Van de Wetering heads the Rembrandt Research Project, created in 1968 to verify whether disputed works were true Rembrandts. Since then, it has disallowed about half the 600 paintings that once were attributed to the Dutch master, identifying them as either works by his students, copies by later admirers or deliberate forgeries. The group of experts also has authenticated several previously unknown Rembrandts.

Over 40 years Van de Wetering has learned to dissect a Rembrandt into its smallest components, from the paint he used, the grounding of the work, the grain in the wood from which he cut his panels and the number of threads in his canvas.

Working with that knowledge and from contemporary copies by students, Van de Wetering could reconstruct works such as The Night Watch, arguably Rembrandt’s most famous work, which has been radically altered and which he calls “a ruin” of the original. “It’s a wreck,” he said in an interview.

In the exhibition, a copy of The Night Watch — a 1642 group portrait of an Amsterdam militia in colourful formal attire — stands next to a recreation of the original. Over the years, the massive painting had been trimmed on all sides, and two figures were cut completely from the left side. The result moved the two central characters to the middle of the canvas, destroying Rembrandt’s intention.