Tweet On this day it’s time to update this blog-series (see below the list of posts) with the French women artists compiled in the latest version of My Project : Digital Research Collection of the Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times.   Topical Catalogue Vol. 2.1 The French Venus, published in 2009, counted only 50 women artists on a total of 977 artists. The ongoing compilation in version 2.1.5 added 183 women artists  on a total of 2348 artists (1). The remarkable anomaly of very high numbers in the periods 1860-99 is linked to a well-known art-historical hype ..read more

Tweet The ongoing series of monthly seminars ‘Styles Revisited’, organised by the research team Visual Contagions of UNIGE (1), is the inspiration to address the quantity of ‘styles’, rarely discussed. The foregoing post 108/ Four art styles in numberspresented the asymmetry of four production processes (styles) in terms of numbers of producers (artists) and their products (artworks), perfectly described mathematically by Lotka’s law(2). The present post describes the time-distribution of number of artists and their rate of adhesion to four art styles Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Ex ..read more

Tweet In the foregoing post 111/ of this series it was demonstrated  that the word Cythère was still very much spread in publications throughout the French 19th and 20th centuries (1, Figs.3 & 4). Subsequently, Cythère became inspiration for illustrators and caricaturists in the flourishing business of all types of journals (2), reporting about the entertainment market, social culture and politics. The images, collected chronologically from 1863 to 1962 in a Google Album, including all metadata (Fig.1), and in a List (Table 1), are evidence of the persistent survival of mythical Cyth ..read more

Tweet The third post in this series, inspired by Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" and  WATTEAU's "Embarquement pour Cythère" (1), explores how Cythère was popular among publishers of French books during three centuries 1700-1999.  A quick search in Europeana yields 37 title images, presented chronologically in a Google-Album (Fig.1). Interesting in this sample is the frequent use of the fake imprint ‘A Cythère’ or similar phrasings, further explored in Table 1. A time distribution of 65 publications (Fig.2) is compared with the graphs generated with the phrase Cythere in WEB-too ..read more

Tweet The data ‘sister-arts’visualized in Fig.1 of the foregoing post comprised 13 theatre-entertainments (comedy or comic opera, ballet, pantomime) inspired by Cythera from 1700 to 1827, listed in the Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts 1300-1990s (1, Note 1.c). However, the CESAR database of the French theatre between 1600 and 1800 offers important complementary information (2). The Table below shows the combined results: 30 authors and 90 performances of all kinds in 10 cities. Special attention is given to the part played by Charles-SimonFavart and his company. Table 1. Theatr ..read more

Tweet “And so we sailed on joyously, totally plunged and sunk in this unbridled desire, until our prosperous voyage brought us to the delicious Cytherean Isle.” Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (3, p.289) This post explores the number of identified artists inspired by the mythical island of Cythera, where lovers went to worship the Goddess of Love Aphrodite/Venusat her temple. The theme has been popular in pictorial arts, where the paintings of Antoine WATTEAU (1684-1721) - ‘L’Embarquement pour Cythère’, 1717, Paris and its replica ca. 1718-19 in Berlin - are now confirmed masterpieces.The narrative ..read more

Tweet WikiArt Visual Art Encyclopedia (1), with its 250,000 artworks by 3,000 artists, is a relatively small online database, but provides plenty of numerical data about artists, their artworks and their styles. This post analyses and visualizes the ‘counts’ of WikiArt for four well known art styles: Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Expressionism (Table 1). Table 1. WikiArt numbers of artists and their artworks style artists artworks total T per artist total A Romanticism 279 n ∑Tn = A 15739 Realism 213 16701 Impressionism 248 16715 Expression ..read more

Tweet                                                                         “… studying all the artists of a period rather than only the great names.”                &n ..read more

Tweet The time-frequency analyses of the artworks depicting Venus and their identified French artists, show a clear shift in the large comprehensive compilation published in the Topical Catalogue ‘The French Venus’ v2.1.4 (2021) when compared to the earlier smaller compilation published in Vol.2.1(2009) – see post 104/ History of my project in progress (1).The period of maximum number of artworks and artists is relocated from period 1750-99 to 1850-99 (Fig.1). This finding is, of course, the result of the increasing availability of digitized archival sources, such as the Salons 1673-1914, but ..read more

Tweet Statistical analysis at the ordinal level of measurement can be understood as a ranking of the number of specific items produced by a given source in a dataset. In this ‘project in progress’ the items are the Venus-artworks produced by the source = artists. In a paper of 2015 entitled 'Distant Viewing in Art History. A Case Study of Artistic Productivity' it was demonstrated that an inverse power equation describes this highly asymmetric relationship (1). The measurements and computations for The French Venus revised version v2.1.4, discussed in the foregoing post (2), confirm again thi ..read more