On the Dynamism of Paintings Through the Distribution of Edge Directions

Abstract

The digitization of artworks has recently offered new computational perspectives on the study of art history. While much of the focus has been on classifying styles or identifying objects, the analysis of more abstract concepts, such as the perception of motion or dynamism in still images, remains largely unexplored. Semioticians and artists have long explored the representation of dynamism in still images, but they often did so through theoretical frameworks or visual techniques, without a quantitative approach to measuring it. This paper proposes a method for computing and comparing the dynamism of paintings through edge detection. Our approach is based on the idea that the dynamism of a painting can be quantified by analyzing the edges in the image, whose distribution can be used to identify patterns and trends across artists and movements. We demonstrate the applicability of our method in three key areas: studying the temporal evolution of dynamism across different artistic styles, as well as within the works of a single artist (Wassily Kandinsky), visualizing and clustering a large database of abstract paintings through PixPlot, and retrieving similarly dynamic images. We show that the dynamism of a painting can be effectively quantified and visualized using edge detection techniques, providing new insights into the study of visual culture.