Volume 417, 1 January 2015, Pages 110–129
A quantitative approach to painting styles
Highlights
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- Applied statistical mechanics methods to the analysis of painting styles.
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- Philosophical concepts like dialectics were modeled as quantitative metrics.
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- Wider dispersion of characteristics for Modern Art while superposition for Baroque.
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- Confirms art history: Moderns are independent in style while Baroques share techniques.
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- Painting shows increasing innovation. High opposition in Baroque–Modern transition.
Abstract
This
research extends a method previously applied to music and philosophy
(Vilson Vieira et al., 2012), representing the evolution of art as a
time-series where relations like dialectics are measured
quantitatively. For that, a corpus of paintings of 12 well-known artists
from baroque and modern art is analyzed. A set of 99 features is
extracted and the features which most contributed to the classification
of painters are selected. The projection space obtained provides the
basis to the analysis of measurements. These quantitative measures
underlie revealing observations about the evolution of painting styles,
specially when compared with other humanity fields already analyzed:
while music evolved along a master–apprentice tradition (high
dialectics) and philosophy by opposition, painting presents another
pattern: constant increasing skewness, low opposition between members of
the same movement and opposition peaks in the transition between
movements. Differences between baroque and modern movements are also
observed in the projected “painting space”: while baroque paintings are
presented as an overlapped cluster, the modern paintings present minor
overlapping and are disposed more widely in the projection than the
baroque counterparts. This finding suggests that baroque painters shared
aesthetics while modern painters tend to “break rules” and develop
their own style.
Keywords
- Pattern recognition;
- Arts;
- Painting;
- Feature extraction;
- Creativity
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