Quantitative Art History

With reference to the concept of distant reading in literary history, distant viewing is a valuable analogy for a quantitative approach to art history. In this case study of artistic productivity eight samples are analysed, extracted from a digital thematic research collection about the iconography of Aphrodite/Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. The result is an empirical finding of regularity never before highlighted in art history. The artistic productivity fits perfectly the distribution known as Lotka’s law of scientific productivity in bibliographic science. Issues of collecting and sampling are discussed and the meaning of this empirical finding is hinted. Suggestions for future research are made.

This paper considers the so-called triumph of American art from the perspective of what Western Europeans could actually see and know of American art at the time. Relying on a database of exhibitions, purchases, and publications of American art in Western Europe from 1945 to 1970 created in the framework of ARTL@S, it reconstructs the precise chain of events and circulations that marked the dissemination and reception of American art in Europe. It consequently draws a more refined and complex understanding of postwar artistic exchanges out of the entangled historical perspectives of the European peripheries, which challenges the retrospectively dominating position of American Abstract Expressionism.

Comment expliquer le succès – ou l’échec – de tel ou tel artiste, ou de tel ou tel objet ? S’appuyant sur les archives des commissaires-priseurs, cet ouvrage pousse la porte des ventes aux enchères publiques à Paris et décompose les rouages du marché de l’art entre 1830 et 1939.

Prosopography investigates the common characteristics of a historical group, whose individual biographies may (or may not) be untraceable, by means of a collective study of their lives, in multiple career-line analysis.
Why not use collective biography in art historical research, despite - or even, because of - art history's general prejudice for individual exception? This paper presents Prosopography as a very valuable technique for art history, and among others, for studying modern art. It insists on the relevance of biographical data contained  in Exhibition catalogues, a source too little explored by art historians in a quantitative and statistical way. I propose to examine what prosopographic approaches can say about "intouchable" art-historical concepts that supposedly cannot be approached with numbers: the artwork, the genious, and the style.

Part I of a slide presentation about the original and its many repetitions till 1899, from my post of August 8, 2014 'Déjà-vu (2): repetitions of TIZIANO's 'Amor sacro e Amor profano''
http://kbender.blogspot.be/2014/08/deja-vu-2-repetitions-of-tizianos-amor.html