# Historic Emergence of Diversity in Painting: Heterogeneity in Chromatic Distance in Images and Characterization of Massive Painting Data Set

## TL;DR

This study analyzes a large dataset of nearly 180,000 paintings to understand how diversity and individuality in art evolved over centuries, using color contrast as a key characteristic.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel statistical framework based on chromatic distance to characterize painting styles and tracks their evolution over time.

## Key findings

- Identifies a significant increase in creative diversity in modern paintings.
- Demonstrates that color contrast effectively captures stylistic heterogeneity.
- Provides a comprehensive dataset for future art evolution studies.

## Abstract

Painting is an art form that has long functioned as a major channel for the creative expression and communication of humans, its evolution taking place under an interplay with the science, technology, and social environments of the times. Therefore, understanding the process based on comprehensive data could shed light on how humans acted and manifested creatively under changing conditions. Yet, there exist few systematic frameworks that characterize the process for painting, which would require robust statistical methods for defining painting characteristics and identifying human's creative developments, and data of high quality and sufficient quantity. Here we propose that the color contrast of a painting image signifying the heterogeneity in inter-pixel chromatic distance can be a useful representation of its style, integrating both the color and geometry. From the color contrasts of paintings from a large-scale, comprehensive archive of 179,853 high-quality images spanning several centuries we characterize the temporal evolutionary patterns of paintings, and present a deep study of an extraordinary expansion in creative diversity and individuality that came to define the modern era.