A New System to Appreciate the Visual Characteristics of a Painting

A painting-viewing system is proposed as a tool to help painting appreciation and to improve the museum experience. This system simultaneously highlights certain visual characteristics of multiple paintings, thus informing users of the links between paintings and the semantic elements that may appear superficially different, and also conveying the art-historical explanation of those characteristics. Through this system’s evaluation, the approach based on “the awareness of the visual characteristics” may be effective as a method of developing the user’s interest in the paintings. When this system is placed in museums and galleries as a mediation tool, it will be useful to a viewer’s preparation for the art-viewing experience. This paper presents the concepts behind the system’s development and the results of the first survey as a piece of a larger project to explore the improvement of painting appreciation as a museum experience.