Painting by Numbers: Computational Methods and the History of Art

This thesis presents a new methodology for computational art history, in the tradition of Distant Reading from literary criticism. This method is based on operationalisation, the transcription of a concept or theory from cultural history into an algorithm. The method is explored through 3 extensive case studies, operationalising concepts from two major art historians of the twentieth century, Aby Warburg (1866-1929) and Michael Baxandall (1933-2008), and from the sixteenth-century Italian painter and art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1592). Through quantitative analysis of visual phenomena, this thesis opens up the possibility of a new scale of art history through the use of computer vision. I conclude with some considerations on the kinds of art-historical thought amenable to operationalisation and computation.