What Would Bruegel Think?
First the artist was born. Shortly thereafter - the art forger. Methods of uncovering fraudulent works of art have advanced along with technology. Most recently Math Professor Daniel Rockmore of Dartmouth College designed a software program, originally for Bruegel drawings, which analyzed the artist’s pen strokes. By scanning and digitizing the drawings Rockmore’s program could characterize which strokes were typical of Bruegel’s method of application and which were not. The inadvertent benefit to artists as Rockmore relays in a recent NPR article is that the software becomes a ” tool to deconstruct art — a way of describing what it means to be Picasso-like or Bruegel-like.” The idea of knowing how a master artist laid down their strokes is surely appealing to many who study the craft, but what would Bruegel make of his artwork reproduced, pixelated and broken down on a small glowing screen? Perhaps a surrealist might understand better.
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