Using art to narrate history, with help from AI | Number Theory

.

The real aesthete can spend hours in front of a painting in an art gallery and wax eloquent on the intended message and context. What if somebody trained a computer programme to look at 630,000 paintings from 1400 onwards and told a story of what influenced the artists and their art when they were produced?

People visit an exhibition called "In Women's Word" showing some artworks of modern Iranian women artists from the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran, Sunday, Aug. 3, 2025. (AP)

A June 2025 research paper by economists (and perhaps also aesthetes) Clément Gorin, Stephan Heblich and Yanos Zylberberg has done exactly that. It classifies artworks

Art as mirror of the times they were produced in

• 
  Art as mirror of the times they were produced in

  That Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica are depictions of political turbulence and protest; the former of the 1830 revolution in France and the latter the Civil War in Spain just before World War II are well known. What Gorin et al tell us is that emotions such as awe, contentment, amusement and excitement fell sharply in many countries during periods such as the world wars and specific countries such as France during the Napoleonic Wars, while they improved in the US during the economic boom which followed World War II. The paper has built a “positivity index” of artworks calculated as the difference between predicted probabilities of uplifting emotions (awe, contentment, amusement and excitement) and darker ones (fear, sadness, anger and disgust) to calculate their results. Across five centuries, the index tends to rise in times of prosperity and collapse in periods of upheaval.
• 
  The emotional fingerprints of history

  Looking beyond the overall index, individual emotions reveal how artists responded to crises and recoveries. A comparison of contentment and anger at different moments in history shows the shifting balance between optimism and unrest. Around 1500, at the height of the Renaissance, contentment was relatively high across much of Europe, though Germany’s levels were lower, reflecting the tensions that would soon erupt in the Reformation. By 1600, during the Little Ice Age and the wars of religion, contentment had slipped while anger and other negative emotions grew more prominent, particularly in France and Germany. By 1800, during the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, paintings in France continued to register elevated anger compared with Britain or the United States, where contentment held up more strongly. The paper highlights Spanish painter Francisco Goya, whose works darkened sharply after 1793 in response to personal misfortune and the wider turmoil of Spain and the Napoleonic wars, underscoring how political upheaval dampened artistic optimism. In 1945, contentment reached one of its lowest points across Europe in the aftermath of World War II.
• 
  Technology and the moods of nations

  The march of technology also left its mark on the canvas. When steamships began remaking global trade in the 19th century, JMW Turner’s paintings captured both awe at technological progress and fear of its fragility. A century later, the spread of radio aroused extreme emotions in artworks from across nations. While it bound communities together, fear rose across nations like Germany, France and even the United States as the new technology became a medium for propaganda. Technology, like war, left behind emotional traces in paint—optimism where it promised prosperity, dread where it threatened upheaval.
• Taken together, these patterns show that art is not only about individual genius, it captures the collective atmosphere of societies. The study also ties artistic moods to forces such as climate, the scientific revolution and globalisation. Rising urbanisation and stronger states tended to sustain optimism, while fragile or war-torn societies painted bleaker pictures. Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876), for instance, embodies the buoyant mood of Paris during the Belle Époque, when prosperity and urban leisure fostered optimism. Paintings cannot tell the whole story of history, but the emotions they convey can provide insights into how people experienced it.