Abstract: 1. Introduction. Illustrated manuscripts may be analysed in terms of both their texts and their illustrations. While statistical techniques have long been applied to the textual analysis of manuscripts, e.g., Lebart and Salem (1994), no corresponding pictorial analysis can be found in the art history literature. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the field can benefit from statistical methods. As an example, graphical loglinear models are used to construct the genealogy of illustrated manuscripts based on counts of their common pictorial traits. The method is applied to 9 Persian illustrated manuscripts of the 14th and early 15th centuries, and the results are commented in relation to the current art historic knowledge of these manuscripts. 2. Graphical loglinear models. The aim is to formalize the intuitive notion that, everything else constant, if two or more illustrated manuscripts have a significant number of pictorial traits in common, they are likely to be related to each other. A pictorial trait may be the presence or absence of a specific scene among the illustrations, the particular shape of a tree, the special choice of a colour, the exact inclination of the brush strokes, or the overall composition of the objects, the design of a landmark, etc.
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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