A Digital Tool to Understand the Pictorial Procedures of 17th century Realism

Francesca Di Cicco, Lisa Wiersma, Maarten Wijntjes, Joris Dik, Jeroen Stumpel, Sylvia Pont; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) Workshops, 2018, pp. 0-0

To unveil the mystery of the exquisitely rendered materials in Dutch 17th century paintings, we need to understand the pictorial procedures of this period. We focused on the Dutch master Jan de Heem, known for his highly convincing still-lifes. We reconstructed his systematic multi-layered approach to paint grapes, based on pigment distribution maps, layers stratigraphy, and a 17th century textual source. We digitised the layers reconstruction to access the temporal information of the painting procedure. We combined the layers via optical mixing into a digital tool that can be used to answer "what if" art historical questions about the painting composition, by editing the order, weight and colour of the layers.