Tweet A recent session of the 2023-24 Artl@s/Visual Contagions Lecture Series in Digital Art History was entitled ‘Metadata: the core of the debate’. Anna Naslund of Stockholm University presented case studies and debated “ … there is a great variety in how analogue art works have been digitized. Not only have the digital representations of art varied over time, but these differences can be linked to different institutional, historical attitudes and priorities.” This Blog published in the past a series of posts describing online resources for art collection freaks, proof of the wide variety of ..read more

Tweet Paris, with his fleet, came to the island of Cythera, off the Greek coast south of Sparta. There he saw Helen, who had come "to do divine service" at a famous temple of Venus. "And when the two had caught sight of each other" their mutual passion flamed, and that night Paris set sail, carrying off Helen from the temple. Dares of Phrygia, one of the many Greek and Latin authors who commented on Homer’s Iliad (6th BC), wrote this story in ‘The History of the Destruction of Troy’ (6th century AD) (1, p.371). Indeed, it is generally accepted that Helen -wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, wa ..read more

Tweet The research team of the project Visual Contagions has recently published a long awaited paper (1) with many examples of illustrations of artworks in periodicals, among them the notorious painting of Eduard MANET: ‘Olympia’ (1863) (2) (Fig.1). To learn more and to ‘See images in context’ i.e. the articles with these illustrations, the web-tool EXPLORE has been re-applied (Fig.2). A synthesis of this exercise is presented in a List of Images in Context with retrieval of the illustrations in the periodicals,  considered as exact duplicate images of the original painting. The informati ..read more

Tweet The controversial concept of Umberto Eco for moving museums presenting only one original artwork, surrounded by all types of other works enlightening the creation, the meanings and all matters ‘quality’ of the original one, was successfully realised in the exhibition ‘Venus unveiled – The Venus of Urbino of Titian’ at the Europalia Arts Festival Italia 2003 (1) (2). The 20th anniversary of this exceptional event is inspiration to apply a second time in this Blog the online tool EXPLORE, part of the unique Visual Contagions project at the Faculty of Letters, University of Geneva, featurin ..read more

Tweet Revision is a practice of systematic and well-organized accumulation, correction and adjustment of information in all data sciences. With gradually increasing digitized archives and ‘open access’ policies, revision of art historical data should be a never-ending exercise. The relevance of revisions is demonstrated in a series of posts about successive updates of the ‘The French Venus’ (2009) (1). The systematic revision progresses with the alphabetic order of the names of the identified French artists who depicted 'Venus and related Topics = Venusart'. In this first post of the ..read more

Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925) is certainly not  a writer/poet whose books are on the compulsory reading list of French schools. Nonetheless, he was and is still very popular and his novel ‘Aphrodite – Mœurs antiques’, published in 1896 (1), is continuously re-edited, translated and illustrated by a large number of French and foreign artists. The present post of this series, inspired by ‘Art Worlds’ (2), develops the quantitative approach (first objective of this blog !) of a sample of editions with 1° a Google Album of collected images (Fig.1); 2° a histogram of the frequencies of 106 edition ..read more

Tweet The search tools on the web platform of EXPLORE, the Visual Contagions project at the Faculty of Letters, University of Geneva, permit a comparison of a selected image with similar images in thousands of printed periodicals ... Come Play Along! (1). In this post our selected image is a unique English Art Deco statue, seemingly never exhibited nor recorded in any Art Journal or other available sources. It is a life-sized sculpture, labelled KESTOS on the base, presently owned by The John Bright Collection, produced in the mid1930s to promote the KESTOS bra of the English underwear manufac ..read more

Tweet Today is the 12th anniversary of this Blog, an occasion to re-examine Blogger analytics once more, because "Blogger Stats data and the view count can be unpredictable as this involves the platform infrastructure." (1, Note 2). The first graph visualizes the total views TVP of each post nr 1 to 115 on 11 June 2023(Fig.1): a highly variable and puzzling curve. But the same data can be presented as the cumulative percentage of TVP versus the proportional number of posts: a curve illustrating that 80% of the views comes from 56% of the posts (Fig.2). This is significantly different to the st ..read more

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