State of the Art: Economic Development Through the Lens of Paintings

Clément Gorin, Stephan Heblich and Yanos Zylberberg

Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: This paper analyzes 630,000 paintings from 1400 onward to uncover how visual art reflects its socioeconomic context. We develop a learning algorithm to predict nine basic emotions conveyed in each painting and isolate a context effect—the emotional signal shared across artworks created in the same location and year—controlling for artist, genre, and epoch-specific influences. These emotion distributions encode subtle but meaningful information about the living standards, uncertainty, or inequality characterizing the context in which the artworks were produced. We propose this emotion-based measure, derived from historical artworks, as a novel lens to examine how societies experienced major socioeconomic transformations, including climate variability, trade dynamics, technological change, shifts in knowledge production, and political transitions

Date: 2025-04-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/efm/media/workingpapers/w ... pdffiles/dp25793.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: State of the Art: Economic Development Through the Lens of Paintings (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:uobdis:25/793

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vicky Jackson ().