Painted or printed? Correlation analysis of the brickwork in Jan van der Heyden's View of Oudezijds Voorburgwal with the Oude Kerke in Amsterdam

David G. Stork; Sean Meador; Petria Nobel

doi:10.1117/12.817186

10 February 2009 Painted or printed? Correlation analysis of the brickwork in Jan van der Heyden's View of Oudezijds Voorburgwal with the Oude Kerke in Amsterdam

David G. Stork, Sean Meador, Petria Nobel

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 7240, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XIV; 72401O (2009) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.817186
Event: IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging, 2009, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

The title painting, in the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague, is remarkable in that every figure and every part of every building is clearly discernible in the minutest detail: decorations, weathercock, bells in the church tower, and so on. Thousands of individual bricks are visible in the buildings at the left and the question has been posed by art scholars as to whether these bricks were laboriously painted individually or instead more efficiently pressed to the painting by some form of template, for instance by pressing a wet print against the painting. Close inspection of the painting in raking light reveals that the mortar work is rendered in thick, protruding paint, but such visual analysis, while highly suggestive, does not prove van der Heyden employed counterproofing; as such evidence must be sought in order to corroborate this hypothesis. If some form of counterproofing was employed by the artist, there might be at least some repeated patterns of the bricks, as the master print master was shifted from place to place in the painting. Visual search for candidate repeated passages of bricks by art scholars has proven tedious and unreliable. For this reason, we instead used a method based on computer forensics for detecting nearly identical repeated patterns within an image: discrete crosscorrelation. Specifically, we preprocessed a high-resolution photograph of the painting and used thresholding and image processing to enhance the brickwork. Then we convolved small portions of this processed image of the brickwork with all areas of brickwork throughout the painting. Our results reveal only small regions of moderate cross-correlation. Most importantly, the limited spatial extent of matching regions shows that the peaks found are not significantly higher than would occur by chance in a hand-executed work or in one created using a single counterproof. To our knowledge, ours is the first use of cross-correlation to search for repeated patterns in a realist painting to answer a question in the history of art.

Citation Download Citation

David G. Stork, Sean Meador, and Petria Nobel "Painted or printed? Correlation analysis of the brickwork in Jan van der Heyden's View of Oudezijds Voorburgwal with the Oude Kerke in Amsterdam", Proc. SPIE 7240, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XIV, 72401O (10 February 2009); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.817186

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available