Connoisseurship and Smart Tools

As the Frans Hals & Co case study (see Chap. 6 ) comprises six huge paintings and the new techniques used to study these yield enormous amounts of data, it soon became clear that data science and computer tools would make a substantial difference in facilitating and enhancing the analysis. It was the reason to start the Seed Money Project 21st Century Connoisseurship: Smart Tools for the Analysis of Seventeenth-Century Paintings (2018–2022), funded by the Netherlands Institute for Conservation, Art and Science (NICAS). Building on very high resolution photographs and advanced technical analyses, online computer tools are causing a turning point in the early twenty-first century. For the first time in history, it has become easier to study paintings online than offline. This chapter focuses on the different computer tools that have been developed and adjusted to the study the large amount of data generated in the context of the Frans Hals or not Frans Hals project and discusses their respective applications.