A Morphometric Approach to Reception Analysis of Premodern Art

The focus of the present paper is to introduce a computer-based methodology for measuring and analyzing the variability between compositions of complete scenes and individual objects of similar medieval manuscripts. On the level of scene compositions, we present a methodology to describe global deformations by a novel piecewise linear registration model that adapts the complexity of each component according to the shape deformation in the underlying region. Moreover, the assignment of regions in a scene or object to different model components induces a clustering of the scene which in turn helps to visualize the structure and geometry of the deformation introduced in the reproduction by the artist. Our algorithm simultaneously infers the correspondences between original and reproduction, finds groups in the image which share the same transformation, and finally estimates the transformation of those groups. Information about the transformation through the illustrations of medieval manuscripts is adjuvant for scholars to reconstruct historic context and semantic changes and is crucial for stylistic interpretation.