Because of their abundance and because of the insight into the ancient world
offered by the depictions on their decorated surfaces, Attic painted ceramics
are an extremely valuable source of material evidence. Knowing the identities
and personalities of the artists who painted them not only helps us
understand the paintings, but also helps in the process of dating them and,
in the case of sherds, reconstructing them. However, few of the artists signed
their wares, and the identities of the artists have to be revealed through a
close analysis of the style in a process called attribution. The vast majority
of the attributions of archaic Attic vases are due to John Beazley whose
monumental works set the stage for the dominance of attribution studies in
the scholarship of Greek ceramics for most of the 20th century. However, the
number of new scholars trained in this arcane art is dwindling as new avenues
of archaeological research have gained ascendency. A computer-aided
technique for attribution may preserve the benefits of the art while allowing
new scholars to explore previously ignored areas of research. To this end, the
present study provides a theoretical framework for computer-aided attribution,
and using the corpus of the Princeton Painter - a painter active in the
6th century BCE - demonstrates the principal that, by employing pattern
recognition techniques, computers may be trained to serve as an aid in the
attribution process. Three different techniques are presented that are capable
of distinguishing between paintings of the Princeton Painter and some of his
contemporaries with reasonable accuracy. The first uses shape descriptors
to distinguish between the methods employed by respective artists to render
minor anatomical details. The second shows that the relative positions of
cranial features of the male figures on black-figure paintings is an indicator
of style and may also be used as part of the attribution process. Finally a
novel technique is presented that can distinguish between pots constructed
by different potters based on their shape profiles. This technique may offer
valuable clues for attribution when artists are known to work mostly with a
single potter. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/373 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Ryan, Adrian John. |
| Contributors | Hilton, John L., Hough, Gavin. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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