Cristina Montagner

In this unique collection the authors present a wide range of interdisciplinary methods to study, document, and conserve material cultural heritage. The methods used serve as exemplars of best practice with a wide variety of cultural heritage objects having been recorded, examined, and visualised. The objects range in date, scale, materials, and st...

In this unique collection the authors present a wide range of interdisciplinary methods to study, document, and conserve material cultural heritage. The methods used serve as exemplars of best practice with a wide variety of cultural heritage objects having been recorded, examined, and visualised. The objects range in date, scale, materials, and st...

Colour is a key element in paintings but its quantitative analysis is seldom used as an interpretative element in the context of the history of art. Here, we show how this can be accomplished by measuring and analyzing the colours of the paintings of the influential Portuguese painter Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1887-1918). His last paintings have bee...

One hypothesis to explain the aesthetics of paintings is that it depends on the extent to which they mimic natural image statistics. In fact, paintings and natural scenes share several statistical image regularities but the colors of paintings seem generally more biased towards red than natural scenes. Is the particular option for colors in each pa...

The chromatic diversity of natural scenes has been quantified from hyperspectral imaging data. Do artistic paintings mimic the same color diversity found in natural scenes? The purpose of this work was to analyze and compare the chromatic diversity of natural scenes and art paintings. Fifty images of natural scenes and 43 images of art paintings we...

This work presents a tool to support authentication studies of paintings attributed to the modernist Portuguese artist Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1887-1918). The strategy adopted was to quantify and combine the information extracted from the analysis of the brushstroke with information on the pigments present in the paintings. The brushstroke analysi...

Painters reproduce some spatial statistical regularities of natural scenes. To what extent they replicate their color statistics is an open question. We investigated this question by analyzing the colors of 50 natural scenes of rural and urban environments and 44 paintings with abstract and figurative compositions. The analysis was carried out usin...

The aim of this work was to compare the preferred chromatic composition for unfamiliar paintings with the original. Stimuli were images of paintings generated by rotating the color volume around the L* axis in CIELAB. The images were presented on a CRT. Four paintings were abstract from Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, two had figurative elements from the...

Observers can adjust the spectrum of illumination on paintings for optimal viewing experience. But can they adjust the colors of paintings for the best visual impression? In an experiment carried out on a calibrated color monitor images of four abstract paintings obtained from hyperspectral data were shown to observers that were unfamiliar with the...

This work introduces the complementary use of μ-Raman and μ-Fourier transform infrared (IR) spectroscopy for the detection of specific carbon chains and cations for the identification of metal carboxylates within oil paint microsamples. Metal carboxylates (metal soaps) form naturally when free fatty acids react with metal cations and may also be foun...

In this work we propose a system for region segmentation of hyperspectral painting images based on pigments identification method and clustering. Our system combines the molecular information (obtained by hyperspectral camera) with the elemental analysis. The data acquired on the paintings are compared with a database of reference materials that be...

The identification of authorship of an important Portuguese artist, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1887-1918), by image processing techniques based both on spectral UV-VIS data and elemental analysis will be presented. Despite his youth, Amadeo was internationally acclaimed, and very successful at the most important International exhibitions, side by sid...

In 1844, the Portuguese Romantic painter Tomás da Anunciação (1818-1879) headed a rebellion against academic training at the Academy of Fine Arts where landscape paintings were all executed in the studio [1]. While this was held to inspire Romantic painting en plein air, documentary evidence shows that the studio continued to be the primary place w...

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso (1887-1918) is one of the most important Portuguese modernist artists. In his short life he explored and combined different influences, particularly when he lived in Paris, where he was in contact with the avant-garde artists. The materials and techniques used by Amadeo are studied in the project Crossing Borders- History, m...

The present paper describes the main results obtained from the characterization of a wide range of natural and synthetic ochre samples used in Portugal from the 19th to the 20th century, including powder and oil painting samples. The powder ochre samples came from several commercial distributors and from the collection of Joaquim Rodrigo (1912-1997...

The shape, orientation and distribution of brushstrokes are distinctive markers left by the artist on the surface of a painting. Consequently, they are useful as additional evidence to decide on issues of attribution and authenticity. This paper proposes an image classification algorithm for the paintings of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, a modern Portug...

The shape, orientation and distribution of brushstrokes are distinctive markers left by the artist on the surface of a painting. Consequently, they are useful as additional evidence to decide on issues of attribution and authenticity. This paper proposes an image classification algorithm for the paintings of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, a modern Portug...

An accurate characterisation of the organic dyes used in artworks, especially those made of paper, is an important factor in designing safe conservation treatments. In the case of synthetic organic dyes used in modern works of art, for example, one frequently encountered difficulty is that some of these dyes are not still commercially available. Re...