Raphael Rosenberg

Art viewing in museums inherently relies on physical movement through galleries. While research has begun to examine movement in art perception, it has focused mainly on abstract paintings and small-scale case studies. We investigated how bodily movement, gaze behaviour and memory interact with a mobile-eye-tracking study in Vienna's Leopold Museum (145 visitors viewing 66 paintings across six rooms). The results show that a) although visitors increased their viewing distance for larger paintings, they did not maintain a constant visual angle, b) visitors repositioned themselves mainly laterally in front of paintings, and c) they frequently compared neighbouring artworks by repeating gazes between paintings. Longer viewing times and repeated returns to a painting were associated with better subsequent memory. These findings suggest that the museum's "white cube" is not a neutral backdrop for independent encounters but a spatially organised environment that shapes horizontal exploration as well as visual comparison between adjacent works.

The Avant‐Garde of the early 20th‐century was characterized by thriving artistic collaborations that gave rise to overlapping movements such as Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism. Although exhibitions acted as central hubs, the resulting artists' networks remain difficult to investigate due to inconsistent documentation, uneven temporal coverage, and rapidly shifting geographic contexts. We introduce Kandinsky , a Visual Analytics approach tailored to uncovering Avant‐Garde exhibition networks. Kandinsky combines a radial clustering layout that captures cohesive artistic ensembles with coordinated views, situating exhibition activity across time and region to enable a structured analysis of historically situated artistic relations. A task‐based validation and usability study with ten experts, supported by an extended case study, show that Kandinsky traces structural communities, transnational and temporal relations, and previously unrecognized patterns. This offers a data‐driven complement to traditional art‐historical inquiry.

Art literature has long held that the composition of a painting guides the beholder's eye, which would imply that viewers perform similar eye movements when looking at the same picture. Recent eye-tracking work has supported this claim, but almost exclusively with figure-dominated paintings, in which depicted humans are strong attractors of attention—leaving open whether shared gaze reflects composition or merely the pull of figures. We tested compositional guidance in the absence of figures by recording the eye movements of 46 art-history students who viewed six still lifes (17th–18th c.) and six abstract paintings (20th c.) for one minute each and afterwards drew the most important compositional lines of each painting. Following Sancarlo et al. (2020), we quantified three kinds of similarity for each painting: between observers' saccades, between their compositional drawings, and between saccades and drawings, in each case contrasting within-painting (self) with between-painting (other) similarity. At the reference grid resolution, within-painting similarity exceeded between-painting similarity for the saccades of all twelve paintings, for the drawings of eleven, and between saccades and drawings for nine. Saccadic similarity decreased with rated visual complexity, whereas drawing similarity did not; no difference emerged between still lifes and abstract paintings. Pictorial composition therefore does shape the gaze even when no figure is present, at least for trained viewers.

Similarity analysis of saccade patterns across conditions or subjects is valuable in vision research, but remains challenging for prolonged free viewing of static stimuli, such as the aesthetic perception of complex artworks, where saccade sequences are densely sampled and individual scanpaths diverge substantially. We propose mapping saccades onto continuous orientation fields via local estimates of density, mean orientation, and angular coherence. By specifying researcher-chosen Orientations of Interest (OOIs), the method yields heatmap visualizations that highlight where gaze flow aligns with compositional structure and symmetry. These heatmaps provide compact, interpretable depictions of dominant saccadic organization and enable visual analytics of very large saccade sets. We further present HeatMatch, a robust, scalable, and segmentation-free similarity framework computed directly from the field statistics. In an art-perception eye-tracking study with long viewing times, we show that HeatMatch recovers genre-, stimulus-, and subject-level regularities and reveals stable individual viewing signatures that generalize across different paintings.

We studied the perception of 16th- and 17th-century narrative paintings in three distinct groups: Deaf Sign Language users (ÖGS), Art History Experts, and Lay viewers. By combining eye-tracking data with open interviews, we aimed to test whether Deaf signers and art Experts would exhibit similar viewing behaviors due to their enhanced visual skills. We found that, despite lacking formal training in art history, Deaf viewers displayed oculometric patterns closely resembling those of Experts. These included shorter fixation durations, broader exploration of the pictorial surface, and increased attention to semantically meaningful elements such as symbolic objects and codified hand gestures. Both Deaf participants and Experts also used more concrete and detailed language to describe the paintings, in contrast to Lay viewers, who tended to offer more general and vague statements. Additionally, Deaf participants exhibited a distinctive pattern when viewing faces, focusing more on the mouth area than the eyes, likely due to visual habits of speech perception. These findings suggest a perceptual overlap between two populations with distinct cultural backgrounds and sensory experiences. Sign language mastery and early deafness may enhance visual perception and image interpretation. The results have broader implications for cognitive science, art history, and Deaf studies, demonstrating the value of cross-domain expertise in understanding human perception. They also support the inclusion of Deaf individuals in art history and museum careers, aligning with the concept of Deaf Gain.

Pointing gestures are among the most common hand signs in early modern painting. Art historians have long assumed that they directly guide the viewer’s gaze towards key elements. However, this assumption has never been tested empirically. To investigate how depicted pointing gestures influence eye movements, we digitally removed the pointed forefingers from 15 paintings (16th-17th cent.) and compared the perception of these edited versions with the originals. Our results challenge traditional assumptions. While pointing fingers attract few direct fixations, their fleeting perception significantly reshapes how other elements are viewed. Semantically related areas – such as the targets of pointing gestures and the faces of pointing characters – receive increased direct attention. Also, pointing characters play a stronger role in saccadic transitions between areas of interest. Finally, our novel AOI dwell time correlation method reveals that viewers establish different semantic connections between characters and objects when pointing gestures are present. In the second phase of the study, open-ended interviews revealed that interpretations of the original paintings differ from those of the edited versions. These results underscore the central role of depicted pointing gestures. Rather than merely directing the viewer’s attention from one point to another, as art theoreticians had assumed, they reshape the narrative connections between elements, ultimately leading to different interpretations. Among all the artworks we analyzed, Caravaggio’s and Raphael’s compositions were the most affected by the removal of pointing gestures. This confirms that the effectiveness of pointing gestures in art also depends on individual artistic approaches and the artist’s mastery in guiding the viewer’s attention.

Art history traditionally relies on qualitative methods. However, the increasing availability of digitized archives has opened new possibilities for research by integrating visual analytics. This survey presents a comprehensive review of the intersection between art history and visual analytics, focusing on network visualization and how it supports researchers in analyzing and understanding complex art historical relationships through nodes (e.g., artists, artworks, institutions) and edges (the relationships between them). We explore how these approaches enable dynamic analysis, offering novel perspectives on artistic influence, stylistic evolution, and social interactions within the art world. Through this, we also examine wedges, a metaphor for the friction often present in art history between individuals and institutions. These tensions, which have historically played a pivotal role in shaping artistic movements, are now better understood through the lens of network visualization, revealing how conflicts and power dynamics influenced the development of art. Through a hierarchical categorization of the literature, we outline saturated problems and research areas as well as ongoing challenges in art historical research. Furthermore, we highlight the potential of visual analytics to bridge the gap between traditional qualitative research and modern computational analysis, offering interactive exploration, temporal analysis, and complex network visualization. We provide a structured foundation for future research in art history, emphasizing the value of network visualization in enriching the understanding of art history.

In museums and art galleries, visitors become less engaged per object over time. This study, comprising a pre-study (N = 31) and a main study (N = 73) in both laboratory and online settings, explores habituation as a potential cause. The primary aim is to reveal the underlying mechanism and propose strategies for its mitigation. Two research questions were set: (1) Is habituation one of the mechanisms behind the decline in engagement? (2) Can inducing novelty into the presented stimulus sequence counteract this decline? In our experiments, we prepared two sequences of art presentations. In one sequence, artworks were presented in sequential blocks by art category, introducing novelty when a shift between blocks occurred. In the other sequence, different categories were presented successively, introducing novelty within blocks. Each sequence was set as the BC (high between-novelty condition) and the WC (high within-novelty condition). Participants were randomly assigned to either one of the conditions. Participants’ engagement level was evaluated via viewing time for each stimulus. We found (1) no evidence for habituation as an underlying mechanism and (2) a mixed impact of introducing novelty between the two studies. Limitations and future directions are discussed.