From the post:
The task of classifying pieces of fine art is hugely complex. When examining a painting, an art expert can usually determine its style, its genre, the artist and the period to which it belongs. Art historians often go further by looking for the influences and connections between artists, a task that is even trickier.
So the possibility that a computer might be able to classify paintings and find connections between them at first glance seems laughable. And yet, that is exactly what Babak Saleh and pals have done at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
These guys have used some of the latest image processing and classifying techniques to automate the process of discovering how great artists have influenced each other. They have even been able to uncover influences between artists that art historians have never recognised until now.
…
At first I thought the claim was that computer saw something art historians did not. That’s not hard. The question is whether you can convince anyone else to see what you saw. 😉
I stumbled a bit on figure 1 both in the post and in the paper. The caption for figure 1 in the article says:
Figure 1: An example of an often cited comparison in the context of influence. Left: Diego Vel´azquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), and, Right: Francis Bacon’s Study After Vel´azquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953). Similar composition, pose, and subject matter but a different view of the work.
Well, not exactly. Bacon never saw the original Portrait of Pope Innocent X but produced over forty-five variants of it. It wasn’t a question of “influence” but of subsequent interpretations of the portrait. Not really the same thing as influence. See: Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X
I feel certain this will be a useful technique for exploration but naming objects in a painting would result in a large number of painting of popes sitting in chairs. Some of which may or may not have been “influences” in subsequent artists.
Or to put it another way, concluding influence, based on when artists lived, is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Good technique to find possible places to look but not a definitive answer.
The original post was based on: Toward Automated Discovery of Artistic Influence
Abstract:
Considering the huge amount of art pieces that exist, there is valuable information to be discovered. Examining a painting, an expert can determine its style, genre, and the time period that the painting belongs. One important task for art historians is to find influences and connections between artists. Is influence a task that a computer can measure? The contribution of this paper is in exploring the problem of computer-automated suggestion of influences between artists, a problem that was not addressed before in a general setting. We first present a comparative study of different classification methodologies for the task of fine-art style classification. A two-level comparative study is performed for this classification problem. The first level reviews the performance of discriminative vs. generative models, while the second level touches the features aspect of the paintings and compares semantic-level features vs. low-level and intermediate-level features present in the painting. Then, we investigate the question “Who influenced this artist?” by looking at his masterpieces and comparing them to others. We pose this interesting question as a knowledge discovery problem. For this purpose, we investigated several painting-similarity and artist-similarity measures. As a result, we provide a visualization of artists (Map of Artists) based on the similarity between their works
I first saw this in a tweet by yarapavan.