The game is well-known: connect any Hollywood actor to Kevin Bacon in as few films as possible. Dreamt up by three friends in the 1990s, it took on a life of its own. Leonard Nimoy? Mr Spock was in Star Trek VI with Leon Russom, who was in He Said, She Said with Kevin Bacon. […]
The game is well-known: connect any Hollywood actor to Kevin Bacon in as few films as possible. Dreamt up by three friends in the 1990s, it took on a life of its own. Leonard Nimoy? Mr Spock was in Star Trek VI with Leon Russom, who was in He Said, She Said with Kevin Bacon. Robert Downey Jr.? Tony Stark was in Avengers: Endgame with Josh Brolin, who was in Hollow Man with Kevin Bacon. There is even a website to help you.
So why are we talking about movie stars on an avowedly serious blog on art? Well, the concept readily translates to other contexts, and turns out to be quite interesting in the process. Have fun and learn at the same time. There are, for example, some famous collaborations in art history, painters whose fame ultimately eclipsed their teachers like Leonardo da Vinci did Verrocchio, or Monet did Eugène Boudin. But can we trace who they taught and influenced in turn? Were there certain artists who were especially influential through having trained many in the following generation? Can we better understand not just the individuals but the wider community they were connected to? (In answer: yes, yes, and yes.)
A little while ago we looked at a painting which, from aspects of style and materials analysis, could be associated with Raphael. We wanted though to expand the group of artists being investigated to make sure that we had reasonably surveyed the range of possibilities. Moreover, we wanted to do this in a manner that minimised common selective biases (it’s really notable how paintings tend to attract famous names!). We also wanted to know things like who was the most influential (connected) artist of the time, and how close one artist was to another, and if specific techniques might have been handed down in a particular workshop. So, with a lot of time and effort, we built a Facebook for early 16th century Florence, tracking the network of masters and apprentices of the era.
Such were the powerful insights this brought to our project, we decided to build a tool that would allow us to apply this approach much more easily to all the work we do. However, the scale of the exercise was daunting. Fortunately, though, a substantial dataset already exists – the Getty’s Union List of Artist Names (ULAN). This contains not only a massive list of artists, but it also critical information on their numerous interrelationships, which we have been able to leverage as a basis for a mapping tool. Consequently, we are delighted to now be able to share the results of this with you through our new app, where you can play Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.
This tool is a fully functional social network application, so it can also be used to determine key social network measures. Examples are things like the closeness of two individuals, or the most connected people in a network. The first of these we call the Vasarik Number, the number of steps between any two people. This is equivalent to the Kevin Bacon game where Leonard Nimoy and Robert Downey Jr have Bacon Numbers of 2, and there is an equivalent number for collaborators with the famous mathematician Paul Erdős, known as the Erdős Number. Our app will provide you with the Vasarik Number if you search for the shortest path between two artist names.
Second, connectedness – formally, ‘centrality’ – does not equate to fame. The most influential artists at a particular time may well be little known, but they happened, say, to run very successful training studios. We will be adding in due course a centrality measure for artists in any network you build, as well as some examples of the art ‘influencers’ of their generation.
Third, a larger aim here is to illustrate just how connected artists are. There can perhaps be an unhealthy focus at times on individuals, to the detriment of understanding the broader context in which they worked. Studying social networks helps to open up our perception of the cultural milieu of a time and a place.
As a final remark, we know that despite the ULAN data being quite extensive, there are still numerous connections not in it. We are currently in the process of addressing this and will continue to add names and links as we collect them. We also plan to add more categories such as patrons and portrait sitters.
We hope you enjoy using the app just as much as we have had fun in developing it.