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Applied mathematics

The statistics of style

Nature volume 463, pages 1027–1028 (2010)Cite this article

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A mathematical method has been developed that distinguishes between the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and those of his imitators. But can the approach be used to spot imitations of works by any artist?

What makes the style of an artist unique? For paintings or drawings, what comes to mind are specific brush or pen strokes, the manner in which objects are shaded, or how characters or landscapes are portrayed. Art historians are skilled at identifying such details through visual inspection, and art collectors and museums currently rely on this type of expert analysis to authenticate works of art. Might it be possible to automate this process to provide a more objective assessment? Is it possible to teach a computer to analyse art? In an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hughes et al.1 demonstrate that subtle stylistic differences between the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and those of his imitators, which were at one time misattributed by art historians, may be reliably detected by statistical methods.

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Figure 1: Sparse-coding analysis of artistic style.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Optometry (B.A.O.) and Department of Physics (M.R.D.), Bruno A. Olshausen and Michael R. DeWeese are at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. baolshausen@berkeley.edu; deweese@berkeley.edu,

    Bruno A. Olshausen & Michael R. DeWeese

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  1. Bruno A. Olshausen
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  2. Michael R. DeWeese
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Olshausen, B., DeWeese, M. The statistics of style. Nature 463, 1027–1028 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/4631027a

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