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\"For two centuries, art dealers had searched in vain for the Holy Grail of art history: a portrait of Christ as the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci. Many similar paintings of greatly varying quality had been executed by Leonardo's assistants in the early sixteenth century. But where was the original by the master himself? In November 2017, Christie's auction house announced they had it. But did they? [This book examines an] icon invested with the power to make or break the reputations of scholars, billionaires, kings, and sheikhs\"-- Provided by publisher.

Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship is the first full-length study of the scholarly formation of the corpus of Rembrandt paintings at the end of the nineteenth century. From 1870 to 1935 the first true catalogues raisonnes of Rembrandt's paintings were produced, incorporating the results of individual connoisseurs' evaluations of authenticity and quality.

\"This magnificent picture-gallery [of Dresden], unique in its way, owes its existence chiefly to the boundless love of art of August III of Saxony and his eccentric minister, Count Brühl.\" With these words the Italian art connoisseur Giovanni Morelli (Verona 18161891 Milan) opened in 1880 the first edition of his critical treatise on the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden (hereafter referred to as \"Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister\"). In the study of the works found within, he applied the so-called Morellian \"experimental method,\" a practice of attribution based on the isolation of details and their subsequent comparison. The basic principle of this method is to identify the hand of a master by observing and studying minor details in a painting, e.g., the shape of the earlobes, fingers, toes, and even nails. According to Morelli these elements are constants in the production of an artist. [Revised Publication Abstract]

The article studies the process of separation of the two layers of painting of the icon “St. Apostle Philip”, which is kept in the church in the Bonevychi village (Sambir district, Lviv region, Ukraine). The expediency of using the chemical method of separation for these work and similar ones, according to the state of preservation and technique of execution, is substantiated. The study shows that the upper layer of the icon was made in the late 19th – early 20th centuries in the technique of oil painting on top of the new gesso (levkas). The original painting of the icon was done in the technique of tempera with the use of silvering and engraving on the background. When studying the manner of painting of the original layer of the icon and based on archival documents about the church in Bonevychi, it was found that first image was painted in the early 18th century to the newly built in 1702 wooden church in Bonevychi. The manner of painting shows that the author of the original icon was a master from the center of church art in the town of Rybotychi (now a village in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship (Województwo podkarpackie) of Poland).

Modern computer vision algorithms allow researchers and art historians to search for artist-characteristic contour extraction from sketches, thus providing accurate input for artwork analysis, for possible assignments and classifications, and also for the identification of the specific stylistic features. We approach this challenging task with three machine learning algorithms and evaluate their performance on a small collection of images from five distinct artists. These algorithms aim to find the most appropriate artist for a sketch (or a contour of a sketch), with promising results that have a higher level of confidence (around 92%). Models start from common Faster R-CNN architectures, reinforcement learning, and vector extraction tools. The proposed tool provides a base for future improvements to create a tool that aids artwork evaluators.

The study provides an interpretive analysis of the creative vision shades and visual metaphor contexts in the depictions of bipolar disorder praxis in Marta Araujo's painting and Sohrad Allaie's drawing from the interpretations of ten respondents. The study discusses the areas of portrayal convergences and divergences in the arts' articulation of bipolar disorder as a universal commonality, the evidences of effectual clarity and cathartic ambiance in the painting and drawing. More so, the cognitive channels through which plausible interpretive attempts are projected through visual metaphor and creative vision are assessed through the respondents' responses. The study adopts a viewer-response analysis approach in its attempt to come up with plausible deductions and extrapolations explaining the embedded significations in the painting and drawing. To deepen the purview on efficacy of art as stimulus for emotion activation, the study applies select theories explaining contexts of visual metaphor, creative vision, and erratic mood swings propelled by the painting and drawing. In the end, the study suggests that Marta Araujo's painting and Sohrad Allaie's drawing are effectual attempts at depicting bipolar disorder syndrome, which yielded variant interpretations in line with art theories adumbrating the ability of art to instigate differing ideas and attributions.

One of the classical features of landscape in Persian manuscript-illustration is a stream of water. Painted in silver, it winds its way through a picture in a manuscript, punctuating the ground with verdant green on either side, even though the stream itself may have tarnished with centuries of exposure to the air. Among a small group of paintings kept in several of the celebrated Hazine albums in the Topkapi Saray Library in Istanbul, the group that Ernst J. Grube, in 1980, had called ‘Chinese People’, one stands out, the cover-illustration to an exhibition in London in 2005. There entitled ‘Enthronement Scene’, it is unlike its closest companion-parallels, which have unpainted grounds but no naturally occurring water in the landscape: it has a surface almost fully covered in pigment; but at its very bottom can be seen the tarnished remains of ‘a silver stream in the foreground’. Placed variously on a continuum stretching ‘between China and Iran’, since about 1972, the prevailing attribution has been to Aq Quyunlu Tabriz around 1480. Given ‘the silver stream in its foreground’, this article re-examines that attribution and proposes that it may be as much as a century earlier but ‘modernised’, given a fully painted landscape, at Ya'qub Beg's court in Tabriz.

In the Replicating a Rembrandt Study project, which revisited the attribution of two portraits of Rembrandt while exploring the strengths and limitations of replication studies in art history, dendrochronological research was carried out to reproduce and replicate research conducted in the 1990s. One of the portraits, at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, Germany, had then been attributed to Rembrandt, whereas the other one, at the collections of the Mauritshuis in The Hague, The Netherlands, was considered a copy. In this study, the reproduction involved reassessing the results obtained for the two panels in the 1990s by comparing the tree-ring measurements produced then with reference oak chronologies from the source area (Poland and the eastern Baltic), and with a third panel from the Rijksmuseum that had matched the wood of the Nuremberg portrait, and seemingly originated from the same oak tree. The replication entailed remeasuring the tree rings in the panels through digital photography and using modern software to compare them to new reference chronologies and the Rijksmuseum panel. Both approaches confirmed the original results, including the southern Baltic provenance of the wood and a same-tree match between the Nuremberg and Rijksmuseum panels. However, the reproduction identified measurement errors in the initial study, while the replication corrected these errors. Furthermore, thanks to the improved reference datasets currently available, the replication provided more accurate interpretations about the felling dates of the trees. This research demonstrates that dendrochronology is a reliable science that should yield consistent results if applied rigorously, regardless of the software or ring-width acquisition method employed. However, for reproducibility, detailed reporting, including reference datasets used and statistical values obtained, is required. Long-term storage of dendrochronological data and digital images from the tree-ring sequences allows for verification and reanalysis without the need to re-examine the artworks. Therefore, it is advised that museums and art collectors commissioning dendrochronological research request dendrochronological reports that contain detailed graphs and information, as well as the shared stewardship of the tree-ring datasets and digital images produced by dendrochronologists.

This article presents the results of a replication study in the humanities, more specifically in art history. The initial study was carried out in 1998–99 and concerned the attribution of two similar painted portraits of Rembrandt in the collections of the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. In the replication study, the initial research questions were readdressed: Is the Mauritshuis version painted by Rembrandt or not, is the Germanisches Nationalmuseum version painted by Rembrandt or not, and how do these paintings relate to each other? Two types of replication were utilised. First, a reproduction – a repetition that stayed as close to the initial study as possible. Second, a conceptual replication – a repetition that used an improved study protocol including new technical research methods. As part of the conceptual replication, the paintings were brought together and compared in real life during an expert meeting. A new protocol to structure expert meetings – the Attribution Expert Consensus Meeting (A-ECM) – was introduced to increase future replicability and mitigate bias related to group dynamics. The reproduction and conceptual replication corroborated the conclusions of the initial study. The A-ECM method revealed differences and similarities in the experts’ argumentation and their valuation of evidence in support of these conclusions. The study demonstrated how replicating this attribution study not only enhanced the trustworthiness of the initial findings, but also revealed broader epistemic implications. In particular, the replication process proved instrumental in identifying avenues for refining attribution methodologies. These include enhancing transparency, promoting equitable knowledge exchange, mitigating biases, and improving future replicability of expert assessments. Collectively, these improvements contribute to more robust and well-substantiated attribution practices. The introduction of the A-ECM further exemplifies how formalised consensus methods can increase scholarly transparency, efficiency, quality, and future replicability of attribution processes. As such, replication can contribute to pathways for adapting art history to current demands of Open Science.

Astronomical auction prices in the late 1990s first drew many people's attention to the phenomenon of the early Papunya boards, the thousand small painted panels created at the remote Northern Territory Aboriginal settlement of Papunya in 1971-72.