title: The colors of paintings and viewers' preferences.
abstract: One hypothesis to explain the aesthetics of paintings is that it depends on the extent to which they mimic natural image statistics. In fact, paintings and natural scenes share several statistical image regularities but the colors of paintings seem generally more biased towards red than natural scenes. Is the particular option for colors in each painting, even if less naturalistic, critical for perceived beauty? Here we show that it is. In the experiments, 50 naïve observers, unfamiliar with the 10 paintings tested, could rotate the color gamut of the paintings and select the one producing the best subjective impression. The distributions of angles obtained are described by normal distributions with maxima deviating, on average, only 7 degrees from the original gamut orientation and full width at half maximum just above the threshold to perceive a chromatic change in the paintings. Crucially, for data pooled across observers and abstract paintings the maximum of the distribution was at zero degrees, i.e., the same as the original. This demonstrates that artists know what chromatic compositions match viewers' preferences and that the option for less naturalistic colors does not constrain the aesthetic value of paintings.
authors.affiliation: Centro de Física, Campus de Gualtar, Universidade do Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal. Electronic address: smcn@fisica.uminho.pt.
authors.forename: Sérgio M C
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Nascimento
authors.affiliation: Centro de Física, Campus de Gualtar, Universidade do Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal.
authors.forename: João M M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Linhares
authors.affiliation: Centro de Física, Campus de Gualtar, Universidade do Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal.
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Montagner
authors.affiliation: Centro de Física, Campus de Gualtar, Universidade do Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal; Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London, EC1V 9EL London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Catarina A R
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: João
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Kinjiro
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Amano
authors.affiliation: Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Av. da República, 300, 2750-475 Cascais, Portugal.
authors.forename: Catarina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Alfaro
authors.affiliation: Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, 1249-058 Lisboa, Portugal.
authors.forename: Ana
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bailão
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003116:Color; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D004954:Esthetics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010151:Paintings; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Aesthetic preference; Art statistics; Color vision; Colors of paintings; Visual arts