Towards Using Natural Images of Wood to Retrieve Painterly Depictions of the Wood of Christ’s Cross

A painting, much like written text, allows future viewers to draw conclusions about the time of its creation or its painter. Also, when looking at a whole corpus of images instead a single instance, trends in painting can be analyzed. One particular trend originating in the 14th century is the transfer of the visual impression of real world materials onto paintings. One object, which is often depicted in paintings around that time being made from wood, is Christ’s cross. Scarce research has been done in the direction of automatically analyzing painterly depictions of the wooden cross of Christ. Hence, this study walks a step towards automatic annotation of wooden crosses in paintings by evaluating three publicly available databases containing natural images of wood for their applicability to use their images as queries to retrieve painterly depictions of the wood of the cross. Experimental results underline the demand for further investigations.