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Tracing the Colors of Clothing in Paintings with Image Analysis

The history of color is full of instances of how and why certain colors come to be associated with certain concepts, ideas, politics, status and power. Sometimes the connotations occur arbitrarily, like in the instance when pink was assigned to baby girls, and blue started to be associated with baby boys at the turn of 19 Century [Paoletti, 1987]. Sometimes though, color associations have very tangible reasons, such as in the case of Marian blue, reserved only for painting Virgin Mary over the centuries. The reason is found in the scarcity of the rock lapis lazuli –even more valuable than gold– from which the blue pigments were extracted. Individual colors have convoluted and contested histories, since they have been attached to many symbols at any given time. John Gage, an art historian who has devoted 30 years of research on the topic of color, explains the conundrum of what he terms “politics of color” in a simple fashion: “The same colors, or combinations of colors can, for example, be shown to have held quite antithetical connotations in different periods and cultures, and even at the same time and in the same place.”[Gage, 1990]. The purpose of the present study is to introduce a method for automatically extracting color distributions and main colors of paintings, as well as color schemes of people in paintings. By visualizing these over time for cross-referencing with historical data, this study will reveal changes in how particular colors were used in a given time period and culture. In this study, we will look at artworks to find out whether certain colors or tones are associated with a specific sex, and if these connotations change over time. To that end, we apply algorithmic tools to process very large datasets automatically, and information visualization tools to depict the findings.