The Digital Curator application allows you to explore the art collections of Central European museums and search for artworks based on specific motifs.
Users of the application can build their combination of objects and reveal how often the subject has occurred across the centuries, view graphics, drawings, or paintings that represent it in different epochs, and compare data with other themes.
The Digital Curator offers a quantitative view of cultural history based on the frequency of symbols and iconographic themes in many artifacts, not on a detailed observation of individual items. This distant viewing can be especially useful if our interest is aimed at exploring a genre, rather than a specific work, to understand the overall social conditions, rather than the life of a particular artist, or to interpret the overall political situation, rather than the views of the selected author. Exploring big cultural-historical data may bring new insights into abstract social phenomena such as cultural and economic influence, canon issues, the relationship between the center and the periphery, or the functioning of the art market. It can also help us better observe the migration of motifs and their takeover across centuries and distant regions.
The Digital Curator database now contains 196 116 works from the collections of 91 museums from Austria, Bavaria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. 71 410 of these works are available under an open license, so it is possible to view them online. Other works are used only as a basis for statistics, presenting the frequency of occurrence of motifs. The AI library for machine learning TensorFlow and the computer service Google Cloud including the tool Google Cloud Vision were used for the automatic detection of the depicted motifs. Data search and storage is performed using the ElasticSearch database and the operation of the application is provided by the Google App Engine service.
Implementation was carried out with the kind support of the UMPRUM, Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague , the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic the Slovak National Gallery, and the BlueGhost digital agency. Thanks also go to many museums that made it possible to use their digitized collections, and to Richard Prajer, Radim Hašek, and Eva Škvárová who helped with the development of the application and the preparation of the database.
The project was designed by Lukas Pilka in 2019-22.
The visualization shows the most used colors of 50 artists. Each artist has their individual color footprint. The shown colors are aggregated and size doesn't represent the actual usage of the particular color by the artist to reduce the complexity inside the application.
You can select each color to find related colors – ones that the artist often used together with that color or other artists frequently used together with that color. If you like a color, you can copy the tone or add it to a collection and export it later.
Leonardo da Vinci, “Salvator Mundi” (c.1500), oil on panel, 25 7/8 x 18 in.(65.7 x 45.7 cm) (courtesy Christie’s)
“Salvator Mundi” (c. 1500) sold at Christie’s for $450,312,500 (inc. buyer’s premium) after just under 20 minutes of bidding, becoming the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. Christie’s hired an outside PR firm for the first time in order to conduct its marketing campaign — branded “The last da Vinci” — which included a video of viewers stunned in awe before the painting. The record price was set despite concerns regarding the precise attribution of the work from figures like Michael Daley, Frank Zöllner, and Jerry Saltz. A Guardian article published last month regarding Walter Isaacson‘s new biography of Leonardo was later revised with an editor’s note explaining that the piece “is the subject of a legal complaint made on behalf of Christie’s International Plc.” Isaacson subsequently took to Facebook to clarify his stance that the work was created by Leonardo.
Conservators at the Prado in Madrid recently made an astonishing discovery. They announced yesterday that the painting assumed to be a replica of the Mona Lisa, had actually been painted by one of his key pupils, working alongside the master. The picture is more than just a studio copy – it changed as Leonardo developed his original composition.
The so-called “Mona Lisa of the Prado” has long been in the museum’s collection, tucked away in its vaults and displayed only occasionally, its significance not fully understood. The experts thought it was painted by some Dutch artist because they assumed it was painted on oak (a wood not used by Florentine painters), but actually it was painted on walnut. In size, it is close to that of the original: the Louvre’s painting is 77cm x 53cm and the Prado’s copy 76cm x 57cm.
Explore l'Histoire de France à travers les collections des musées et les documents d'archives
HD photo of The Birth of Venus