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Department of History of Art Open Access Policy Deposits

This series is automatically populated with publications deposited by UC Riverside Department of History of Art researchers in accordance with the University of California’s open access policies. For more information see Open Access Policy Deposits and the UC Publication Management System.

The Parabolic Discourse Window and the Canterbury Roll: Social Change and the Assertion of Elite Status at Canterbury Cathedral

(2015)
  • 1 supplemental ZIP

Computerized Face Recognition in Renaissance Portrait Art: A quantitative measure for identifying uncertain subjects in ancient portraits

(2015)

This article explores the feasibility of face-recognition technologies for analyzing works of portraiture and, in the process, provides a quantitative source of evidence to art historians in answering many of their ambiguities concerning identity of the subject in some portraits and in understanding artists? styles. Works of portrait art bear the mark of visual interpretation of the artist. Moreover, the number of samples available to model these effects is often limited. Based on an understanding of artistic conventions, we show how to learn and validate features that are robust in distinguishing subjects in portraits (sitters) and that are also capable of characterizing an individual artist?s style. This can be used to learn a feature space called portrait feature space (PFS) that is representative of quantitative measures of similarities between portrait pairs known to represent same/different sitters. Through statistical hypothesis tests, we analyze uncertain portraits against known identities and explain the significance of the results from an art historian?s perspective. Results are shown on our data consisting of over 270 portraits belonging largely to the Renaissance era.

Cover page of Isaac Laughing: Caravaggio, non-;traditional imagery and traditional identification

Isaac Laughing: Caravaggio, non-;traditional imagery and traditional identification

(2001)

From the time it was completed nearly four hundred years ago, Caravaggio’s painting of a nude boy embracing a ram (today in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome) has confounded viewers as to its subject, which has been variously called ‘Pastor friso’, Saint John the Baptist, Corydon, Paris, and ‘nude youth with a ram’. This essay argues that none of these titles accounts for what we see in the painting and, no less importantly, what we do not. Using a range of modes of analysis, we propose a new reading of the painting as a variant on the theme of the Sacrifice of Isaac, one that has fascinating implications for Caravaggio’s conception of the viewer–subject relationship and which contributes to a deepening of our understanding of one of early modern Europe’s most innovative and provocative painters.

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