The ExCITe Center at Drexel University, May 9, 2013

3:00pm

Dr. C. Richard Johnson, Jr., the Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick Senior Professor of Engineering and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, will speak at the ExCITe Center about his area of expertise: computational art history. The claim that two paintings are on canvas from the same original roll can support conclusions on dating, authenticity, and other issues of basic importance in art historical painting analysis. Traditionally, such claims begin with establishing matching average thread counts for the two paintings. Averages are typically obtained from a few manual spot counts at points scattered across the painting. Manual spot counts are taken from x-rays of paintings mounted on a lightbox and viewed through a magnifying eyepiece. Recognizing thread counting from x-rays as a Fourier spectral analysis problem propelled the founding of the Thread Count Automation Project (TCAP) in 2007. Being able to compute the thread count for every square centimeter across the painting revealed a striped pattern in the local weave densities. Paintings sharing threads from the same roll will possess the same striped pattern, which converts a weave match search into a correlation problem. The weave density and angle maps produced by automated thread counting are becoming fundamental tools in the emerging field of computational art history.

This talk will present several discovered weave matches with art historical implications among the paintings of Van Gogh, Vermeer, Velazquez, and Poussin.