Title: Historic Emergence of Diversity in Painting: Heterogeneity in Chromatic Distance in Images and Characterization of Massive Painting Data Set,
Abstract: Painting is an art form that has long functioned as a major channel for the
creative expression and communication of humans, its evolution taking place
under an interplay with the science, technology, and social environments of the
times. Therefore, understanding the process based on comprehensive data could
shed light on how humans acted and manifested creatively under changing
conditions. Yet, there exist few systematic frameworks that characterize the
process for painting, which would require robust statistical methods for
defining painting characteristics and identifying human's creative
developments, and data of high quality and sufficient quantity. Here we propose
that the color contrast of a painting image signifying the heterogeneity in
inter-pixel chromatic distance can be a useful representation of its style,
integrating both the color and geometry. From the color contrasts of paintings
from a large-scale, comprehensive archive of 179,853 high-quality images
spanning several centuries we characterize the temporal evolutionary patterns
of paintings, and present a deep study of an extraordinary expansion in
creative diversity and individuality that came to define the modern era.