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Math shows how the composition of landscape paintings changed over time

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/evaamsen/20...over-time/

EXCERPTS: . . . artists put a lot of thought into the placement of each element on the canvas. Now, researchers [...] have used a new method to find out how the composition of paintings changed over time in Western art. By digitally analyzing thousands of paintings, they discovered that the average placement of the horizon in landscape paintings has slightly shifted over the years.

The researchers collected 14,912 images of landscape paintings [...] and wrote a program to interpret certain aspects of these digital images. ... In a recent article in PNAS they describe how they designed an algorithm to identify areas in the images that corresponded to horizontal or vertical lines. They specifically looked at landscape images, because those very often have clearly pronounced horizontal and vertical lines in the horizon, buildings, trees, and cliffs.

[...] Because the collection of images used in this study consisted entirely of landscape paintings, the most prominent dividing line in most of the images was the horizon. And when the researchers looked at the data ... they noticed that the horizon slightly shifted over the years. In paintings from the 16th century, the horizon was higher than in those from the late 17th century. Then, lower horizons were the norm until the mid 19th century, when they shifted up again.

[...] This type of analysis isn't limited to paintings. The same techniques could be used to study composition patterns in films, typography or photography, for example. It could be a way to quickly assess a large number of pieces to find a pattern or trend, like this study did. But we can't leave art analysis entirely to computers... (MORE - details)
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