Satellites of European Paintings

Description: A data visualization exploring color use evolution with artistic movements in pre-modern art Europe.

Goal: Does style or technology affect the use of color? Looking at color use in European paintings across time and artistic movements.

Data:

• Metropolitan Museum of Art API
• 1st century colour palettes : Pigments of classical greece and rome from vitruvius, pliny, theophrastus, dioscorides (2017). Forest Row, East Sussex : Artists Bookworks.
• Hall, M. B., author. (2019). The power of color : Five centuries of european painting New Haven : Yale University Press.
• The oxford history of classical art (1993). Oxford; New York : Oxford University Press.

Data Collection: Using node, I downloaded all the paintings in the European art collection from the MET API. Using Colorthief, a javascript library, I extracted the average color used in each painting and saved them to a JSON file. I then grouped the paintings based on artistic movement using several data sources as references. Finally, d3 was used for visualization.

Audience: Art enthusiasts and art historians.

For detailed documentation, please click here. For live project, please click here.