Page 313 - The Black Box Book

honors through the “human face”, “figure” and “coat of arms”. Similarly,
these themes could be further refined by means of additional condi-
tions. If we are interested in romantic landscape paintings, we can find
them, for example, through “castle ruins”, which distinguishes them from
the hunting genre, where, although there are also “trees” and “plants”,
there are also “dogs” and “wild animals”. The image of an abbot or bishop
is distinguished from a monarch by a “miter”, and otherwise a “royal crown”
helps. It sounds banal and perhaps even absurd; however, the results
are very convincing. Just look at the attached visualizations presenting
sample images according to each condition.
Let us now transition from genre to Christian iconographic symbol-
ism. Now that we are able to automatically recognize some central Western
Christian symbols (for example, the “halo,” the “crucifix,” the “Latin cross,”
the “Madonna,” or the “angel”), we should be able to measure how their
appearance has changed over the centuries. The following visualizations
show samples of works with corresponding iconographic motifs, while
the graphs present the frequency of phenomena across history. This is
a type of frequency analysis similar to that employed by Google Ngram
Viewer, with the exception that the values are based not on the occurrence
of keywords in scanned texts, but on the motifs portrayed in digitized Figure 14: Frequency of occurrence Still lifes
paintings, drawings, and prints. with flowers across the centuries. The vertical axis indi-
cates the share of the genre in the total Digital Curator
database. Author: Lukáš Pilka

Figure 13: The frequency of Christian symbols
across the centuries. The vertical axis indicates
the proportion of works in which a Western Christian
symbol (e.g., “halo,” “crucifixion,” “Latin cross,”
“Madonna,” or “angel”) appears in the total Digital Cura-
tor database. Author: Lukáš Pilka

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