A color study of art history
Monagrid measures the color of famous paintings and prints, then lets you compare them: one work against another, an artist against their movement, a century against the next.
What you're looking at
Every work in the collection gets four things. A palette: its five to eight main colors, each with the share of the canvas it covers. The list includes small accents as well as large areas, so the blue of a Vermeer turban counts even though it covers only a few percent. A grid: the painting rebuilt from colored cells, with big cells where the color is calm and small ones where it's busy, so you can see where the color sits. And a set of measurements: lightness, contrast, vividness, warmth, complexity, hue range and focus. And a composition study: balance, symmetry, calm space and detail, measured from the image (more below).
Why swatches
The eye can tell millions of colors apart, which makes comparing paintings pixel by pixel useless. So every color is matched to the nearest of 224 fixed Monagrid swatches, grouped into eleven everyday color families. The swatches are spaced evenly in a perceptual color space (OKLCH), and they are densest among the earths, ochres and near-neutrals where old paint spends most of its time. That shared vocabulary is what lets a Rembrandt and a Monet sit on the same chart.
Where the images come from
Paintings, dates, media and museums come from Wikidata, and images from Wikimedia Commons, usually the museums' own photographs. Every image shown is in the public domain. A few works are still in copyright, such as Josef Albers's Homage to the Square paintings. For those, Monagrid publishes only the colors measured from the museum's photograph, never the picture itself.
Composition, measured
The composition study is measured, not assigned. Monagrid doesn't decide whether a painting "follows" the rule of thirds or the golden ratio: those are claims about what a painter intended, and they can be read into almost anything. Instead it measures four things from the image. Balance: where the visual weight sits, with areas that stand apart from the painting's neutral ground, or carry strong color, weighing more. Symmetry: how closely the shapes and edges on one side mirror those on the other. Calm space: how much of the canvas holds little detail, judged against one yardstick for the whole collection. Detail: how much of the canvas holds half of all the detail, so the smaller the share, the more concentrated it is.
On a work's page, the Composition view draws the painting's grid as fine lines, with the balance point and faint centre and thirds lines for orientation only. Artist and movement pages average the four numbers, and the averages tell a familiar story: symmetry falls from the Renaissance to the Baroque, then climbs back with the modernists.
Worth keeping in mind
These are measurements of photographs, not of paint. Yellowed varnish, restorations, gallery lighting and cameras all shift color, so small differences between two works can be the photograph talking. Large patterns, like the arrival of light, broken color in the nineteenth century, are another matter.
Credits
Monagrid is made by Peter Urfer, for Alphaus Studio.
Color math uses the OKLab color space by Björn Ottosson. Typeset in Instrument Serif, Instrument Sans and DM Mono. Collection data from Wikidata (CC0), images from Wikimedia Commons and the Art Institute of Chicago.