Speakers
Description
A particular form of medieval book decoration is so-called pen flourishing, used to describe delicate penwork with floral and geometric motifs. Pen flourishing typically appears in decorated initials inserted, usually in red and blue, after the main text had been copied. As book production became increasingly specialized in the later Middle Ages, this task was performed by rubricators, calligraphers, gilders, or painters. Such initials carried no narrative function but served as visual anchor points within the text and allowed for a wide range of ornamental expression. Pen flourishing is used by art historians as a marker of individual hands, regional styles, and workshop networks.
USTP and the research center of Klosterneuburg abbey have teamed up to investigate computational analysis of medieval pen flourishing. We are investigating methods to analyze large amounts of material with the use of digital tools and thus to raise new questions on sources from medieval libraries that have been largely unexplored so far.
Our goal is to develop a prototype that can be used to support art historical research in the processing of mass sources. The progress so far is a transparent method to estimate pen flourishing similarity based on local patterns [1]. Currently, we are developing an interactive tool allowing for two tasks: a) to travel through our training data corpus alongside the similarity of individual pen work as well as local patterns and b) to upload pen flourishing and retrieve similar pen flourishing and local patterns. At the conference, we will be presenting our similarity estimation method [1] and demonstrating a functional prototype of our interactive tool.
[1] Florian Kibler, Monica Apellaniz-Portos, Max Theisen, Victor-Adriel De-Jesus-Oliveira, Martin Haltrich, Matthias Zeppelzauer, and Markus Seidl. 2025. Transparent Similarity Estimation of Medieval Pen Flourishing via Local Visual Patterns. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on analySis, Understanding and proMotion of heritAge Contents (SUMAC '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3746273.3760203