Have Large Vision-Language Models Mastered Art History?

Abstract

The emergence of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has established new baselines in image classification across multiple domains. We examine whether their multimodal reasoning can also address a challenge mastered by human experts. Specifically, we test whether VLMs can classify the style, author and creation date of paintings, a domain traditionally mastered by art historians. Artworks pose a unique challenge compared to natural images due to their inherently complex and diverse structures, characterized by variable compositions and styles. This requires a contextual and stylistic interpretation rather than straightforward object recognition. Art historians have long studied the unique aspects of artworks, with style prediction being a crucial component of their discipline. This paper investigates whether large VLMs, which integrate visual and textual data, can effectively reason about the historical and stylistic attributes of paintings. We present the first study of its kind, conducting an in-depth analysis of three VLMs, namely CLIP, LLaVA, and GPT-4o, evaluating their zero-shot classification of art style, author and time period. Using two image benchmarks of artworks, we assess the models' ability to interpret style, evaluate their sensitivity to prompts, and examine failure cases. Additionally, we focus on how these models compare to human art historical expertise by analyzing misclassifications, providing insights into their reasoning and classification patterns.