Abstract: This talk provides an accessible introduction to a 17-year effort to apply basic digital image processing and optimization algorithms to assist in the art historical analysis of Old Master paintings on canvas and drawings on paper. Paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Johannes Vermeer and drawings by a variety of seventeenth-century Dutch artists will be used as examples. The tasks were selected following embedment among museum conservators and curators and academic art historians interested in technical and digital art history. Those chosen are automating thread counting of canvas supports of oil paintings and watermark matching of handmade paper supports of ink and charcoal drawings. The solutions devised are shown to lead to significant insights beyond their original target. Advice is provided to image processing engineers- based on guidelines developed early in the search for suitable tasks- on the challenge of collaborating with researchers who do not “speak” mathematics in describing, solving, or interpreting their research.
[1] C. R. Johnson, Jr. and W. A. Sethares, eds., Counting Vermeer: Using Weave Maps to Study Vermeer’s Canvases, RKD Studies, 2017. (https://countingvermeer.rkdstudies.nl/contents)
[2] C. R. Johnson, Jr., W. A. Sethares, and M. H. Ellis, “Overlay Videos for Quick and Accurate Watermark Identification, Comparison, and Matching,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, vol. 13.2, 2021. (https://jhna.org/articles/automated-watermark-identification/)
Bio: C. Richard (Rick) Johnson, Jr. is the Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick Senior Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University. During the last fourteen of his forty years on the faculty at Cornell since 1981, and the three years since his retirement from Cornell, he has focused his research on the emerging field of computational art history. His approach has been to apply his engineering background in digital signal processing to the advancement of art history scholarship. The primary focus has been on the development and application of digital tools for hunting and confirming matches of manufactured patterns in art supports, in particular the canvas of paintings and the laid paper of prints and drawings of European Old Masters. Rick received two Eta Kappa Nu national awards as the Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer in 1982 and the C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Young Electrical Engineering Teacher in 1983. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1989 and selected a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 1991. He was designated a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow of Cornell University in 2004. In 2005, he was a Fulbright Research Scholar to the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris, France. In 2008, he was named the first Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick Senior Professor of Engineering at Cornell.