To the naïve observer, cubist paintings contain geometrical forms in which familiar objects are hardly recognizable, even in the presence of a meaningful title. We used fMRI to test whether a short training session about Cubism would facilitate object recognition in paintings by Picasso, Braque and Gris. Subjects, who had no formal art education, were presented with titled or untitled cubist pa...

This paper describes a decade of work on digital imaging for museums. From 1989 to 1992, the visual arts system for archiving and retrieval of images (VASARI) project produced a digital-imaging system that made color-calibrated images of up to 20 000 20 000 pixels directly from paintings. It used seven colorseparation bands in the visible region, resulting in an average color error of around 1 ...

The visual effects of lighting on art paintings is an important aspect that should be considered by museum curators. The aim of this work was to determine the correlated color temperature (CCT) of daylight illumination preferred by observers when appreciating art paintings. Hyperspectral images of 11 oil paintings were collected at the museum, and the appearance of the paintings under daylight ...

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), one of the founding fathers of modern painting, is best known for his vivid colors, his vibrant painting style, and his short but highly productive career. His productivity is even higher than generally realized, as many of his known paintings cover a previous composition. This is thought to be the case in one-third of his early period paintings. Van Gogh would oft...

There is evidence that presenting titles together with artworks affects their processing. We investigated whether elaborative and descriptive titles change the appreciation and understanding of paintings. Under long presentation times (90 s) in Experiment 1, testing representative and abstract paintings, elaborative titles increased the understanding of abstract paintings but not their apprecia...

The aim of this study is to consider breast imagery in art as depicted through western painting. Twenty western art paintings were collated. Most of the sample paintings were created from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century and some are from the Renaissance period. Ten anthropometric items were used to measure 15 distances between two landmarks and 3 angles between three po...