About

Elizabeth C. Mansfield is a Distinguished Professor of Art History at Penn State, specializing in 18th- and 19th-century European and British art and art historiography. She joined the faculty at Penn State in 2018 and has served as department head for a five-year term. Her research includes a focus on the history of the Realist movement in European art and literature during the 18th century. She is also a co-Principal Investigator of the NEH-funded Constable’s Clouds project, which explores the application of computer vision to the study of 19th-century European art. Her scholarly interests extend to historiography, with recent publications addressing the social history of art, the relevance of computer vision for art history, and the interconnected historiographies of style and realism. Mansfield's academic background includes a BA in Art History and a BA in Linguistics from the University of California, Irvine, and a PhD from Harvard University.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Art history
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Visual arts
• Artificial Intelligence
• Epistemology
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• Introduction: Art History after Computer Vision

  The Art Bulletin · 2024-04-02 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The essays gathered in this special section of The Art Bulletin, “Art History after Computer Vision,” explore the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to art historical research. Written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, they collectively advocate for informed, deliberate engagement with AI by art historians. The intent of this special section is not to provide an exhaustive account of the myriad ways in which AI is already affecting disciplinary practices—whether in conservation labs, libraries, heritage sites, museums, or classrooms (real and virtual)—but rather to initiate a discipline-wide discussion of the implications of AI for art history.

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• A Machine Learning Paradigm for Studying Pictorial Realism: How Accurate are Constable's Clouds?

  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · 2023 · 6 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science

  The British landscape painter John Constable is considered foundational for the Realist movement in 19th-century European painting. Constable's painted skies, in particular, were seen as remarkably accurate by his contemporaries, an impression shared by many viewers today. Yet, assessing the accuracy of realist paintings like Constable's is subjective or intuitive, even for professional art historians, making it difficult to say with certainty what set Constable's skies apart from those of his contemporaries. Our goal is to contribute to a more objective understanding of Constable's realism. We propose a new machine-learning-based paradigm for studying pictorial realism in an explainable way. Our framework assesses realism by measuring the similarity between clouds painted by artists noted for their skies, like Constable, and photographs of clouds. The experimental results of cloud classification show that Constable approximates more consistently than his contemporaries the formal features of actual clouds in his paintings. The study, as a novel interdisciplinary approach that combines computer vision and machine learning, meteorology, and art history, is a springboard for broader and deeper analyses of pictorial realism.

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• A Machine Learning Paradigm for Studying Pictorial Realism: Are Constable's Clouds More Real than His Contemporaries?

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2022 · 3 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Art history
  • Art

  The British landscape painter John Constable is considered foundational for the Realist movement in 19th-century European painting. Constable's painted skies, in particular, were seen as remarkably accurate by his contemporaries, an impression shared by many viewers today. Yet, assessing the accuracy of realist paintings like Constable's is subjective or intuitive, even for professional art historians, making it difficult to say with certainty what set Constable's skies apart from those of his contemporaries. Our goal is to contribute to a more objective understanding of Constable's realism. We propose a new machine-learning-based paradigm for studying pictorial realism in an explainable way. Our framework assesses realism by measuring the similarity between clouds painted by artists noted for their skies, like Constable, and photographs of clouds. The experimental results of cloud classification show that Constable approximates more consistently than his contemporaries the formal features of actual clouds in his paintings. The study, as a novel interdisciplinary approach that combines computer vision and machine learning, meteorology, and art history, is a springboard for broader and deeper analyses of pictorial realism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Five Books about Historiographic Scholarship and Art History

  Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide · 2021-10-15

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social Art History in Retrospect

  2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Cloud studies as Romantic (and Realist) fragment

  Word & Image · 2021-01-02

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Henri Zerner and Charles Rosen’s meditation on the significance of the Romantic “fragment” is followed a few pages later by a passing reference to Alexander Cozens’s A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785–86). They do not elaborate on the treatise’s relevance for their argument, except to observe that Cozens’s “blots” show an early engagement with abstraction. With this off-hand citation, Zerner and Rosen present their readers with a fragment of their own. To take up and examine this rhetorical fragment is to see that Cozens plays a crucial role in Zerner and Rosen’s formulation that Romanticism and Realism are mutually constitutive, that they are expressions of the same aesthetic and social impulses. In no place is this made clearer than through Cozens’s deployment of cloud studies. A consummate expression of Friedrich Schlegel’s conception of the fragment as “a little work of art, complete and perfect in itself, and separate from the rest of the universe,” cloud studies nonetheless remain marginal to inquiries into the history of Romanticism. Most scholarship on cloud studies seeks to identify their presumptive referent, whether contemporary interest in meteorology or trends in Christian theology. Rather than proceeding from the assumption that cloud studies represent something, this article argues that this exemplary fragment illustrates Romantic (and, hence, Realist) aesthetic theory itself. What is more, this article argues that cloud studies, as theorized by Cozens, provide visual support for a new history of nineteenth-century French Realism that resolves its vexed relationship with British art.

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• The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting by Marcia B. Hall

  Eighteenth-Century Studies · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting by Marcia B. Hall Elizabeth C. Mansfield Marcia B. Hall, The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 304; 304 color and 8 b/w illus. $45.00 cloth. Marcia Hall's The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting extends the scope of the author's earlier publications on the techniques and materials of early modern painting into the twentieth century. Hall's landmark 1992 book, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Art, helped to invigorate the practice of Technical Art History, which brings scientific analysis to bear on the study of individual works of art while also attending closely to artists' techniques and workshop practices for their evidentiary value. Further buoyed by the so-called "Material Turn" in cultural and historical studies, Technical Art History is now frequently applied to the study of eighteenth-century visual culture. The field has benefitted from this attention to technical and material considerations not least because it has helped advance scholarship beyond the conventional geographies of British and European artistic production; Technical Art History has also aided a much-needed recalibration of the scholarly status of painting in relation to the rest of eighteenth-century visual culture. Painting was never the ne plus ultra for eighteenth-century viewers and patrons. When deployed by scholars of eighteenth-century [End Page 486] visual culture, Technical Art History is as likely to be applied to porcelain figures, pastel drawings, lacquer cabinets, embroidered textiles, sugar sculptures, or ivory chairs as to paintings. Hall's focus on painting may strike some historians of eighteenth-century material culture as needlessly narrow, though many will undoubtedly find the book a useful complement to existing literature on artists' materials and techniques. Hall makes clear from the outset that she is not necessarily writing for specialists, nor is the eighteenth century her area of primary interest: "My expertise is the Italian Renaissance, so that is my baseline here" (15). Her first two chapters are, in fact, devoted to her specialization, and it is here that she lays the groundwork for her discussions of European painting of later periods. The first chapter addresses fifteenth-century, mostly Italian, painting, and provides an introduction to tempera, fresco, and oil. The distinctive properties of these media, the different techniques used to exploit their unique qualities, and the history of their use by Renaissance artists are presented with precision and clarity. Occasional recourse to conservation reports or technical studies are integrated into the narrative in such a way that readers without any artistic or scientific training will have no difficulty understanding the import of these media for the history of early modern Italian painting, especially as practiced in Rome, Florence, and Venice. With the second chapter, Hall provides a likewise pellucid condensation of the argument she put forth in Color and Meaning. Here, she identifies four "modes" or "color styles" available to painters starting in the sixteenth century. Each mode is distinguished by its ground or imprimatura as well as by a particular approach to managing color and modeling. Hall associates each of the four modes with the artist chiefly responsible for bringing it to prominence: the sfumato (smoky) mode is linked with Leonardo; the unione (unified) with Raphael; the chiaroscuro (shadows-and-highlights) with Sebastiano del Piombo; and the cangiantismo (hue-shifting) with Michelangelo. Prior to the sixteenth century, Hall argues, artists would have learned the color style used in the workshop where they were trained. Some artists may have learned more than one mode, but most did not. Continuity of workshop practice was viewed favorably in the early Renaissance as it had been for several centuries. The conditions change, according to Hall, in the course of the sixteenth century, so that by the time artists like Caravaggio were launching their careers, painters were freely exploiting and even combining various modes. Hall attributes this catholic approach to the use of color styles in Western Europe after the Renaissance to the breakdown of the workshop system. Shifts in patronage—fueled mostly by an expanding market for art to adorn the residences of those made...

  PublisherDOI

• ARTHUR WALTER MANSFIELD (1926–2020)

  ARCTIC · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Environmental ethics
  • Art history
  • Art
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Art and Artists

  2020-06-24

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  The conceptual framework of Atlantic history calls for a nuanced understanding of the designations “art” and “artist.” As self-evident as these terms might seem, they are in fact dynamic categories whose meanings have shifted—and continue to shift—in response to historical circumstances. Awareness of the historiography of these terms helps to clarify their past use and current meanings in relation to Atlantic history. Abiding within the terms art and artist are associations with Eurocentric concepts like originality, masterpiece, and genius. This is no surprise. The study of art as a distinct field of history emerged in Europe in the 18th century, and the resulting discipline of art history encoded Enlightenment assumptions regarding the superiority of certain social institutions, cultural forms, and kinds of knowledge. As a category of cultural artifact, art was ascribed a primarily aesthetic function that could be appreciated by all viewers, regardless of cultural origin. The problem with this understanding of art was its internal contradiction: to exist, “art” depends simultaneously on highly subjective judgments about aesthetic merit and on claims of universality. Historically, reliance on this understanding of art excluded the visual and material culture of non-Europeans, including indigenous peoples, from art historical valuation. Constraints imposed by the term “artist” were similar. Conventionally applied to individuals engaged in the deliberate production of objects recognized for their primarily aesthetic value, the category “artist” was closed to those working outside a specifically Western and modern cultural economy. Consideration of art and artists within the context of Atlantic history has provided an opportunity to re-examine these categories. In the early 21st century, most scholars of Atlantic history use the terms art and artist inclusively, without implying aesthetic judgment or intent. Those seeking to distance themselves further from historical prejudices may rely instead on such terms as “visual culture” and “maker” in place of “art” and “artist.” Rather than dispensing with the terms art and artist, this article proceeds from the belief that these concepts retain historiographic usefulness. Strangeness is an inevitable part of cultural encounter, and so is commensurability. To highlight the importance of interconnectedness for the study of art and artists in Atlantic history, this article is organized around networks of cultural exchange, encounter, and exploitation.

  PublisherDOI

• Elizabeth C. Mansfield. Review of "Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850–1900" by Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowski.

  CAA Reviews · 2019-02-08

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kelly Malone

  2 shared

• Zhuomin Zhang

  2 shared

• D. H. Lawrence

  2 shared

• James Z. Wang

  Pennsylvania State University

  2 shared

• George S. Young

  The Francis Crick Institute

  2 shared

• John E. Russell

  Pennsylvania State University

  2 shared

• David Farmer

  1 shared

• James T. Boulton

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• NEH Level I and Level II Digital Advancement Grants
• Charles Rufus Morey Prize
• National Humanities Center Fellowship
• Gladys Kreble Delmas Foundation Fellowship
• CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year (Tennessee)