Doing so allowed them to see trends such as painting styles that predominated during certain eras. The researchers then ran other algorithms designed to look for patterns between the paintings. The second might have split the land into buildings in one partition and farmland in another. As an example, the first run of the algorithm might have simply created two partitions on a painting-everything on land, and everything in the sky. The researchers ran the algorithm on each painting multiple times, each time creating more partitions. The data for each of the paintings was then sent through a mathematical algorithm that drew partitions on the digital images based on contrasting colors. The work involved digitally scanning 14,912 paintings-all of which (except for two) were painted by Western artists. To overcome such bias, the researchers with this new effort looked to mathematics to see if it might be useful in uncovering features of paintings that have been overlooked by human scholars. The researchers further note that to date, most studies of art history have been qualitatively based, which has led to interpretive results. This suggests that the study of art history can serve as a channel of sorts-illuminating societal trends over time. But art also serves, the researchers contend, as a barometer for visualizing the emotional tone of a given society. Two people looking at the same painting can walk away with vastly different impressions. Beauty, as the saying goes, is in the eye of the beholder-and so it is also with art.
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