Physics

Entropy (arrow of time)

Creativity

Statistical physics

Visual arts

Artificial intelligence

Psychology

Painting

Computer science

Quantum mechanics

Cluster analysis

Social psychology

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Significance The critical inquiry of paintings is essentially comparative. This limits the number of artworks that can be investigated by an art expert in reasonable time. The recent availability of large digitized art collections enables a shift in the scale of such analysis through the use of computational methods. Our research shows that simple physics-inspired metrics that are estimated from local spatial ordering patterns in paintings encode crucial information about the artwork. We present numerical scales that map well to canonical concepts in art history and reveal a historical and measurable evolutionary trend in visual arts. They also allow us to distinguish different artistic styles and artworks based on the degree of local order in the paintings.

History of art paintings through the lens of entropy and complexity