Evolutionary Analysis and Cultural Transmission Models of Color Style Distributions in Painting Arts

This paper studies the evolutionary dynamics and cultural transmission of color styles in painting arts. Creative cultures, such as visual arts, develop through repeated processes of knowledge transmission and modification, and characteristics of these processes can lead to macroscopic evolutionary patterns. While recent studies have found intriguing trends and dynamic patterns in the evolution of visual arts, the relationship between these trends and cultural transmission processes remains poorly understood. We first analyze the evolutionary dynamics of color distributions in oil paintings by applying a clustering method. The results reveal that some of the frequencies of the color style clusters exhibit synchronous changes that are related to creators’ biases in producing paintings belonging to specific clusters. We subsequently construct models of cultural evolution to represent how these biases are transmitted between creators, based on two hypothetical transmission modes: one guided by influencer-to-descendant connections and another guided by community-to-descendant connections. Through statistical inference, we show that the influencer-guided transmission model better fits the historical data. Furthermore, highly influential creators, as inferred by the model purely from content data, remarkably align with those commonly mentioned in the literature on art history.