Hi folks. I wondered if anyone had come across any research that uses computational methods to look at perspective in art, such as in renaissance oil paintings, or foreshortening in sculpture, etc. I am sure there is a method to do this, but not sure if anyone has applied it to a corpus of paintings to understand the artist's use of perspective better. If you have any pointers at all I'd be glad to hear about them.
Thanks!
Melissa
David Stork is the guy you want! He gave a jaw-dropping talk on this at STS '11: "Computer Vision in the Study of Art: Towards Digital Connoisseurship of Master Paintings and Drawings."
http://www.diatrope.com/stork/FAQs.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/24/AR2009042402232.html
Arno Bosse
Member
A few years ago there was some buzz around the idea that Vermeer and other Dutch artists used a camera obscura to help draft their paintings. Philip Steadman from.. err, University College, London wrote a book about this so you must know all about it already. Well, anyway, maybe some others haven't heard of it yet so I'll leave the reference. See http://www.amazon.com/Vermeers-Camera-Uncovering-Behind-Masterpieces/dp/0192159674 and http://www.vermeerscamera.co.uk/
I've not read it myself and so I can't comment to what extent he carried out computer analysis per se but I know a lot of effort was put into 3D reconstructions of the spaces in the paintings.
There's a whole sub-field in computer aided visualization that deals with extracting 3D info from 2D image sources. See, for example, http://ict.debevec.org/~debevec/Research/ I would look through last few SIGGRAPH Proceedings. That's where the best of this kind of work gets presented and published.
For an informed art historian's view on this I'd drop a line to Barbara Stafford formerly at the University of Chicago (now retired). She's still very active in the field, publishing and lecturing, and would very likely know who is working on these kinds of approaches. http://barbaramariastafford.com/
Arno Bosse
Member
Replying to @Bethany Nowviskie's post:
I'm pretty sure I went to a lecture by Stork at the University of Chicago way back ago. It was in a room full of physicists, plus Barbara Stafford, and me. I think this was right about the time David Hockney's documentary (http://www.koopfilms.com/hockney/) on the subject came out. There's a lot of hand waving but it certainly made for a compelling narrative. The vast majority of Art Historians, however, were not bemused (http://www.koopfilms.com/hockney/articles.html).
Thanks all. I knew about the method with Vermeer, etc - but hadnt come across the *computational* method so these are great pointers. And I'll track down Philip Steadman when I'm back at UCL - didnt know he was there... (ahhh, the problems of being an academic in London where no-one knows anyone as they are all too busy commuting...)
I love DHanswers, me. Thanks!
Inna Kizhner
Member
You may find this paper interesting http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~ecdfourq/composition/CAE2008Abstract.html
It is about the use of tiling and certain points in Renessaince paintings to create a similar effect in computer graphics.
Melissa, do you know Corrine Welger? Here's her blog (http://observatoire-critique.hypotheses.org/), which even has some UCLDH content (http://observatoire-critique.hypotheses.org/965).
Arno Bosse
Member
A colleague in Göttingen has drawn my attention to an article in Der Spiegel (http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/gadgets/0,1518,775650,00.html) which describes work by Prof. Björn Ommer in Heidelberg (http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/Staff/bommer/) on iconography and gesture detection in medieval images.
It's not exactly what you're looking for (i.e. perspective analysis) but I'm adding it here since it's related and may help someone else visiting this page who is researching similar approaches.
chris.abyi@gmail.com
Member
Hi,
although this post's already quite old, here's something I came across a while ago:
Perception of Space in Piero della Francesca's Annunciation: An Eye-Movement and Art-Historical Study
Kapoula, Zoï.; Bucci, Maria-Pia.; Yang, Qing.; Bacci, Francesca,
Leonardo, Volume 43, issue 2 (April 23, 2010), p. 153-158.
ISSN: 1530-9282
MIT Press
Best,
Christian
You must log in to post.
A project of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Chronicle of Higher Education's ProfHacker
Icons by famfamfam
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
