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Dissecting landscape art history with information theory
Painting has played a major role in human expression, evolving subject to a complex interplay of representational conventions, social interactions, and a process of historization. From individual qualitative work of art historians emerges a metanarrative that remains difficult to evaluate in its val...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
National Academy of Sciences
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7604435/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33046626 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2011927117 |
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author | Lee, Byunghwee Seo, Min Kyung Kim, Daniel Shin, In-seob Schich, Maximilian Jeong, Hawoong Han, Seung Kee |
author_facet | Lee, Byunghwee Seo, Min Kyung Kim, Daniel Shin, In-seob Schich, Maximilian Jeong, Hawoong Han, Seung Kee |
author_sort | Lee, Byunghwee |
collection | PubMed |
description | Painting has played a major role in human expression, evolving subject to a complex interplay of representational conventions, social interactions, and a process of historization. From individual qualitative work of art historians emerges a metanarrative that remains difficult to evaluate in its validity regarding emergent macroscopic and underlying microscopic dynamics. The full scope of granular data, the summary statistics, and consequently, also their bias simply lie beyond the cognitive limit of individual qualitative human scholarship. Yet, a more quantitative understanding is still lacking, driven by a lack of data and a persistent dominance of qualitative scholarship in art history. Here, we show that quantitative analyses of creative processes in landscape painting can shed light, provide a systematic verification, and allow for questioning the emerging metanarrative. Using a quasicanonical benchmark dataset of 14,912 landscape paintings, covering a period from the Western renaissance to contemporary art, we systematically analyze the evolution of compositional proportion via a simple yet coherent information-theoretic dissection method that captures iterations of the dominant horizontal and vertical partition directions. Tracing frequency distributions of seemingly preferred compositions across several conceptual dimensions, we find that dominant dissection ratios can serve as a meaningful signature to capture the unique compositional characteristics and systematic evolution of individual artist bodies of work, creation date time spans, and conventional style periods, while concepts of artist nationality remain problematic. Network analyses of individual artists and style periods clarify their rhizomatic confusion while uncovering three distinguished yet nonintuitive supergroups that are meaningfully clustered in time. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7604435 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | National Academy of Sciences |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-76044352020-11-12 Dissecting landscape art history with information theory Lee, Byunghwee Seo, Min Kyung Kim, Daniel Shin, In-seob Schich, Maximilian Jeong, Hawoong Han, Seung Kee Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A Physical Sciences Painting has played a major role in human expression, evolving subject to a complex interplay of representational conventions, social interactions, and a process of historization. From individual qualitative work of art historians emerges a metanarrative that remains difficult to evaluate in its validity regarding emergent macroscopic and underlying microscopic dynamics. The full scope of granular data, the summary statistics, and consequently, also their bias simply lie beyond the cognitive limit of individual qualitative human scholarship. Yet, a more quantitative understanding is still lacking, driven by a lack of data and a persistent dominance of qualitative scholarship in art history. Here, we show that quantitative analyses of creative processes in landscape painting can shed light, provide a systematic verification, and allow for questioning the emerging metanarrative. Using a quasicanonical benchmark dataset of 14,912 landscape paintings, covering a period from the Western renaissance to contemporary art, we systematically analyze the evolution of compositional proportion via a simple yet coherent information-theoretic dissection method that captures iterations of the dominant horizontal and vertical partition directions. Tracing frequency distributions of seemingly preferred compositions across several conceptual dimensions, we find that dominant dissection ratios can serve as a meaningful signature to capture the unique compositional characteristics and systematic evolution of individual artist bodies of work, creation date time spans, and conventional style periods, while concepts of artist nationality remain problematic. Network analyses of individual artists and style periods clarify their rhizomatic confusion while uncovering three distinguished yet nonintuitive supergroups that are meaningfully clustered in time. National Academy of Sciences 2020-10-27 2020-10-12 /pmc/articles/PMC7604435/ /pubmed/33046626 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2011927117 Text en Copyright © 2020 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Physical Sciences Lee, Byunghwee Seo, Min Kyung Kim, Daniel Shin, In-seob Schich, Maximilian Jeong, Hawoong Han, Seung Kee Dissecting landscape art history with information theory |
title | Dissecting landscape art history with information theory |
title_full | Dissecting landscape art history with information theory |
title_fullStr | Dissecting landscape art history with information theory |
title_full_unstemmed | Dissecting landscape art history with information theory |
title_short | Dissecting landscape art history with information theory |
title_sort | dissecting landscape art history with information theory |
topic | Physical Sciences |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7604435/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33046626 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2011927117 |
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