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Art history has only partly emerged from the shadow of Giorgio Vasari, whose
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects is its foundational text. Cognitive aesthetics, or the study of art in light of the psychology of perception, is a half-century old, as are various computer-based techniques of art analysis. But the broader discipline remains dominated by monographic studies of figures or movements distinguished by talent or genius, with great emphasis on biography and the effects of inspiration and experience on individual works. The composition of the canon, and its biases and blind spots, has been a major theme of art criticism, but often, the tone is more polemical than measured and reflective. In
Painting by Numbers presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to chart, for the first time, the sheer scale of 19th-century artistic production. With new quantitative evidence for more than 500,000 works of art, Diana Seave Greenwald provides fresh insights into the 19th century, and the extent to which art historians have focused on a
In the mid-1960s, the renowned art historian Jules Prown was jeered. He was presenting new research at the annual meeting of the College Art Association, the principal professional art historical association. Prown had used a mainframe in the Yale University computer lab to examine links between the socio-economic backgrounds of American painter John Singleton Copley’s sitters and their preferences in portraiture. His first slide which showed an IBM punch card, then representative of cutting-edge computing technology prompted some colleagues to boo. [1] Recounting this experience, Prown recalled:
At first consideration, the art historian and the computer would seem to be eccentric companions. Art historians are concerned with qualitative discriminations that reveal themselves slowly…to the investigations of a trained mind and sensitive eye. The computer…deals with quantitative computations at an unvarying pace with incredible speed. Its monotonous, inflexible, unthinking effi