Secrets of Balanced Composition as Seen through a Painter's Window: Visual Analyses of Paintings Based on Subset Barycenter Patterns

In this paper, the author implements and uses a subset barycenter pattern to analyze various paintings. The suggested visualization and analysis tool is inspired by Gombrich's theory of a painter's window and Locher's psychological research on computational balance. An image's or an image group's subset (set of cropped images) may reveal genre and artist characteristics. Moreover, it may also reveal forensic information about each artist's individual style and its changes over time with barycenter dispersion patterns. The suggested barycenter pattern analysis can enrich the methods of art history and criticism.