Understanding the Historic Emergence of Diversity in Painting via Color Contrast
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Painting is an art form that has long functioned as major channel for communication and creative expression. Understanding how painting has evolved over the centuries is therefore an essential component for understanding cultural history, intricately linked with developments in aesthetics, science, and technology. The explosive growth in the ranges of stylistic diversity in painting starting in the nineteenth century, for example, is understood to be the hallmark of a stark departure from traditional norms on multidisciplinary fronts. Yet, there exist few quantitative frameworks that allow us to characterize such developments on an extensive scale, which would require both robust statistical methods for quantifying the complexities of artistic styles and data of sufficient quality and quantity to which we can fruitfully apply them. Here we propose an analytical framework that allows us to capture the stylistic evolution of paintings based on the color contrast relationships that also incorporates the geometric separation between pixels of images in a large-scale archive of 179,853 images. We first measure how paintings have evolved over time, and then characterize the remarkable explosive growth in diversity and individuality in the modern era. Our analysis demonstrates how robust scientific methods married with large-scale, high-quality data can reveal interesting patterns that lie behind the complexities of art and culture.
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