The diversity of painting styles represents a rich visual vocabulary for the construction of an image. The degree to which one may learn and parsimoniously capture this visual vocabulary measures our understanding of the higher level features of paintings, if not images in general. In this work we investigate the construction of a single, scalable deep network that can parsimoniously capture th...

We evaluate two competing accounts of the relationship between beauty and category structure. According to the similarity-based view, beauty arises from category structure such that central items are favored due to their increased fluency. In contrast, the theory-based view holds that people's theories of beauty shape their perceptions of categories. In the present study, subjects learned to ca...

Two paintings of older men by Rembrandt (1609-1669) are examined to demonstrate that historical attitudes toward diseases of old age and the ageing person's response to illness can be investigated in paintings. The works selected are of different genres and date from different stages of Rembrandt's own life, one from his youth and one from his old age. Both paintings show figures who have joint...

Although a great number of petroglyphs have been identified in Iran, only a few rock painting sites have been found. Despite this, a considerable number of rock paintings have been discovered in Kuh-e-Donbeh, which is a mountain located to the south-west of the city of Esfahan in central Iran. The paintings can be found on the rims of seasonal water channels on this mountain. All the depictions...

The objective of this work is to recognize object categories in paintings, such as cars, cows and cathedrals. We achieve this by training classifiers from natural images of the objects. We make the following contributions: (i) we measure the extent of the domain shift problem for image-level classifiers trained on natural images vs paintings, for a variety of CNN architectures; (ii) we demonstr...

We examine two paintings by Piet Mondrian, and suggest that his depiction of tree foliages exhibit fractal patterns of a specific dimension. Our analysis implies that fractality may possess an aesthetic value that affected Mondrian, perhaps in a similar way as it inspired Jackson Pollock, another famous painter who incorporated fractality in several of his paintings. In recent years there has b...

This paper describes an automatic approach in archaeological photogrammetry for the documentation and recovery of rupestrian paintings. Visible and near-infrared images were taken from an opened-cave before and after moistening the stone wall. Digital image processing techniques, specially multispectral and multiband classifications, were used to recognise and extract nondestructively the primi...

Statistical analysis of art, particularly of the abstract genre, is becoming an increasingly important tool for understanding the image creation process. We present a multifractal clustering analysis of non-representational images painted by adults and children using a ‘pouring’ technique. The effective dimensions (D0) are measured for each, as is the associated multifractal depth ΔD = D0 D∞. I...