Perceptual Intelligence Lab, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands.
Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
J Vis. 2023 Jun 1;23(6):2. doi: 10.1167/jov.23.6.2.
Most studies on the perception of style have used whole scenes/entire paintings; in our study, we isolated a single motif (an apple) to reduce or even eliminate the influence of composition, iconography, and other contextual information. In this article, we empirically address two fundamental questions of the existence (Experiment 1) and description (Experiment 2) of style. We chose 48 cut-outs of mostly Western European paintings (15th to 21st century) that showed apples. In Experiment 1, 415 unique participants completed online triplet similarity tasks. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) reached a nonrandom three-dimensional (3D) embedding, showing that participants are able to judge stylistic differences in a systematic way. We also found a strong correlation between creation year and embedding, both a linear correlation with Dimension 2, and a rotational correlation in the first two dimensions. To interpret the embedding further, in Experiment 2, we fitted three color statistics and nine attribute ratings (glossiness, three-dimensionality, convincingness, brush coarseness, etc.) to the 3D perceptual style space. Results showed that Dimension 1 is associated with spatial attributes (Smoothness, Brushstroke coarseness) and Convincingness, Dimension 2 is related to Hue, and Dimension 3 is related to Chroma. The results suggest that texture and color are two important variables for style perception. By isolating the motifs, we could exclude higher levels of information such as composition and context. Interestingly, the results reinforce previous findings using whole scenes, suggesting that style can already be perceived in sometimes very small fragments of paintings.
大多数关于风格感知的研究都使用了整个场景/整幅画；在我们的研究中，我们将单个主题（苹果）分离出来，以减少甚至消除构图、图像学和其他上下文信息的影响。在本文中，我们通过实验解决了风格存在（实验 1）和描述（实验 2）的两个基本问题。我们选择了 48 个来自西欧绘画的剪贴图（15 世纪至 21 世纪），这些画都展示了苹果。在实验 1 中，415 名独特的参与者完成了在线三元相似性任务。多维尺度分析（MDS）达到了非随机的三维（3D）嵌入，表明参与者能够以系统的方式判断风格差异。我们还发现创作年份与嵌入之间存在很强的相关性，二维与维度 2 呈线性相关，前两个维度呈旋转相关。为了进一步解释嵌入，在实验 2 中，我们将三种颜色统计和九种属性评分（光泽度、三维度、逼真度、笔触粗糙度等）拟合到 3D 感知风格空间中。结果表明，维度 1 与空间属性（平滑度、笔触粗糙度）和逼真度有关，维度 2 与色调有关，维度 3 与色度有关。结果表明，纹理和颜色是风格感知的两个重要变量。通过分离主题，我们可以排除构图和上下文等更高层次的信息。有趣的是，这些结果强化了使用整个场景的先前发现，表明在绘画的有时非常小的片段中就可以感知到风格。
