Machine learning techniques are used to study overlap and influence of paintings.
This overlap is achieved by comparing concepts that are present on the paintings. These concepts include everything from simple object description such as duck, frisbee, man, wheelbarrow to shades of colour to higher-level descriptions such as dead body, body of water, walking and so on. For each painting a vector of 3,000 concepts is determined. For each vector they searched for similar vectors using natural language techniques and a machine learning algorithm.
"The algorithm is also able to identify individual paintings that have influenced others. It picked out Georges Braque’s Man with a Violin and Pablo Picasso’s Spanish Still Life: Sun and Shadow, both painted in 1912 with a well-known connection as pictures that helped found the Cubist movement."