Digital Morphology of Ornaments – Novel Methods for the Analysis, Modelling and Research of Ornament Forms, linking Art History and Computer Vision, applied to Augsburg Rocaille Prints of the 18th Century

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Few areas of art historical research are characterized by such elementary desiderata as studies on rocaille ornaments. These forms emerged in France around 1730 and became the predominant form of ornamentation of the 18th century, especially in Central Europe. Notwithstanding the large number of objects – from the snuffbox to the monumental stucco work – and a sheer inexhaustible variety of forms, a deplorable uncertainty in dating, attribution and scientific assessment still prevails. The main reason for this deficiency are terminological difficulties – the irregular, shell-like forms evade both a geometric and an iconographic description. Yet, ornamental prints in which the French forms were disseminated and interpreted offer great opportunities for a comprehensive analysis. Several thousand etchings originate from the important publishing center Augsburg alone, showing arts and crafts objects and decorative forms, printed between 1730 and 1775.We address this desideratum by employing an interdisciplinary approach at the interface between art history and computer science: the analysis of forms with techniques from the field of computer vision, especially in combination with graph theory and machine learning. For a feasible application to rocaille forms, we will develop new methods in order to make the abstract image contents accessible to an investigation with algorithmic techniques. Based on an already existing collection of about 2100 digitized Augsburg prints, we will develop a tool chain which categorizes the works according to similarities and enables the identification of related forms and works. This research tool will enable us to find answers to fundamental questions concerning the attribution, dating and application of prints as models and patterns, which in turn open up research perspectives in current art historical theory, especially in the areas of cultural transfer and the pictorial turn.Our realization will be based on the possibility of subdividing the rocaille compositions into a framework of volutes and the attached polymorphic ridges. We will extract geometric, attributed graphs describing and abstracting the set of S- and C-shapes of the volutes, while we will represent the protean ridges as textures with statistical noise parametrizations and sub-graphs. Together with suitable similarity measures, graph visualization paradigms, and graph transformations, we will develop tools that afford new possibilities for researching ornaments in art history.