Abstract
Abstract Classical painting styles are remarkably different between Europe and East Asia. Classic, post-Renaissance European paintings are approaching photorealism with its rich expressions of shading and highlights whereas paintings from northeast Asia consist of motifs drawn in faint shades and dark contours. Given recent findings that artwork follows the statistical regularities of natural scenes, it is sensible to hypothesize that western and eastern painting styles reflect the visual environment of the respective province. Here, we propose that the different climates of Europe and Asia produced different natural light environments that changed the visual appearance of objects, which in turn influenced painting style. Analysis of meteorological data and optical simulations show that directional lightfields in Mediterranean climates produce object images with variegated shading and sharp highlights. Cloudy and diffused monsoon-like lightfields, in comparison, produce line-shaped shading only around the deepest concavities and remove highlights as well as cast shadows. Image statistics analysis suggests that western and eastern painting styles mimic such differences in visual appearance. The style of classical artworks that have been appreciated in a particular cultural realm could partially mirror the implicit structure of images as constrained by the natural light environment of the corresponding habitat.
Highlights
There is a remarkable difference between the styles of classical painting in Europe and Asia (Fig. 1) while we can see small but clear variations within each region (e.g., Italian vs Dutch paintings)
Historically speaking, northeastern Asian paintings have been virtually devoid of the cast shadows and specular highlights that are so central to European photorealism
There are significant variations in style within each region, but such variations are far smaller than those between regions. This huge discrepancy in painting style has been ascribed to the diversity in various factors ‒ e.g., philosophy, aesthetics, and technology ‒ in Europe and East Asia that have remained culturally separate until the last few centuries
Summary
There is a remarkable difference between the styles of classical painting in Europe and Asia (Fig. 1) while we can see small but clear variations within each region (e.g., Italian vs Dutch paintings). Recent psychophysical experiments show that human observers tend to prefer visual patterns that follow natural image statistics (Spehar et al, 2003), and violations of naturalscene statistics tend to produce visual discomfort or unpleasantness (Fernandez and Wilkins, 2008; Juricevic et al, 2010; Ogawa and Motoyoshi, 2020, 2021; O’Hare and Hibbard, 2011). According to these findings, it is sensible that a specific painting style in a cultural region reflects the statistical properties of the visual environment in which it was developed. We propose the tentative hypothesis that climate, via its effect on natural-scene image statistics, plays a significant role in the development of these painting styles (Motoyoshi, 2011)
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