Although the visual arts have long been a feature of civilization courses, instructors do not always exploit their full potential. This paper presents a checklist to help teachers identify the relevant aspects of the arts for study. Its goal is to facilitate comprehensive treatment of works of art by focusing on three areas: the aesthetic dimension, the social context, and the artist’s own expe...

This within-subjects experimental study investigated the influence of the arts on cortisol for economically disadvantaged children. Participants were 310 children, ages 3-5 years, who attended a Head Start preschool and were randomly assigned to participate in different schedules of arts and homeroom classes on different days of the week. Cortisol was sampled at morning baseline and after arts ...

Iconography is the domain of understanding the meaning of historical visual artworks. A formalization of iconographic knowledge can provide a basis for a semi-automatic description of what the content shown on a historical image means without the need for a domain expert. Semantic Web standards can be applied for an iconographic knowledge representation using multiple levels of expressiveness t...

The similarity in fractal dimensions of paint “blobs” in samples of gestural expressionist art implies that these pigment structures are statistically indistinguishable from one another. This result suggests that such dimensions cannot be used as a “fingerprint” for identifying the work of a single artist. To overcome this limitation, the multifractal spectrum is adopted as an alternative tool ...