Quantitative Analysis of Artists' Characteristic Styles through Biologically-Motivated Image Processing Techniques: Uncovering a Mentor to Johannes Vermeer

Many limitations have been addressed in appreciating artworks with conventional analytical methods. This study was accordingly designed to get around the limitations by quantitatively analyzing artworks through biologically-motivated image processing techniques that reflected characteristics of human visual information processing. This research method pursued to shed new lights on longstanding disputes that have remained unsolved in art history and provide a new perspective on frequently imposed authenticity debates on masterpieces. It might be an add to the establishment of an objective standard in appreciating aesthetic values of artworks and to archiving artists’ characteristic styles that could be applied to various areas in many ways. This study, as the first step for achieving this goal, specifically explored one of the important questions in art history, uncovering a mentor for ‘an artist who remains forever unknown’ Johannes Vermeer. To do that, three interdisciplinary research methods of cognitive science, art history and engineering were adopted that reflected characteristics of human information processing. First, styles of lines in artworks of Vermeer and other artists who have been suggested as a mentor for him have been compared and analyzed. To quantitatively pick out artists’ characteristic line styles, line orientations were analyzed by utilizing Gabor wavelets that have been used in simulating configuration of visual cells’ receptive field in human visual brain. Second, comparing the distributions of radial frequency components in faces found in artworks of Vermeer and other artists, characteristic drawing styles of curved shapes have been critically analyzed. Third, complementary colors of cobalt blue and yellow ocher which are the representative colors of the School of Delft have been extracted from artworks of Vermeer and other artists and compared by calculating the Euclidian distance of these colors. The results from three analyses have led us to the converging conclusion that the most influential mentor of Vermeer is Gerard Ter Borch.