State of the art: Economic development through the lens of paintings

This paper examines over 630,000 paintings created since 1400 to explore how visual art reflects its socioeconomic context. We develop an algorithm to classify nine basic emotions expressed in each painting and identify a context effect—the emotional signal common to artworks produced in the same location and year—while controlling for artist-specific, genre-specific, and epoch-specific factors. These emotional distributions reveal subtle yet meaningful information about the living standards, uncertainty, and inequality prevailing at the time of creation. Using this artwork-level data, we examine how societies perceived and responded to major transformations and shocks, including political transitions, climatic variability, the decline of religiosity, the rise of science, and other significant developments.