As stated on the Metropolitan Museum's website, their archives hold over 470,000 works, and the data associated with as well as pictures of these objects can be accessed via the Met's publicly released API here. In terms of data, each work has around 50 attributes (date added to collection, medium, and even under what fund a piece is purchased): a lot to explore and think about.

Having spent a significant portion of our classtime on European works, especially portraiture, in Art Humanities @ Columbia, I chose the most fitting subset of data: European Portraits, one of the 13 departments at the Met. Noncoincidentally, the works in this department had the highest proportion of detectable faces.

This small visualization aims to give one a bit of insight into the the aesthetic representation of the human face in European portraits. It provides a visual overview of its style and development throughout the years as well as a peek into how the Met's curatorial decisions in representing these art periods.

Using OpenCV in Python, I constructed a series of scripts that normalized faces from each portrait input by performing facial detection, assigning facial landmarks, aligning features, and warping the image based on Delaunay triangulation. This way, an accurate and nonpolluted average can be taken across the subset of transformed faces. In other words, it’s a fancy way of saying: I cropped the portraits into uncomfortably close face shots, squashed those into 2D, and took the average of those faces.

Out of the 2278 works housed in the department, only 797 of them had one or more faces detected. Keep in mind, then, that this isn’t the most accurate representation of the Met’s collection of European portraits (more on that later — fig. in progress). This is discounting their trove of nondocumented works, too. Nonetheless, there is a clear chronological progression that corresponds with artistic developments at the time, starting with medieval and church-esque works to the realism of The Renaissance.

Press your left and right arrow keys (← and →) to scroll through the slides of the visualization below.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. s well as a look into the Met’s curation of pieces that it believes to represent of these periods.