The art-space of a global community: the network of Baroque paintings in Hispanic-America

This paper presents the results of a multidisciplinary collaboration in Digital Humanities that focuses on the multi-scale analysis of the network of Baroque paintings in the territories of the Hispanic Monarchy from the 16th through the 18th centuries. We apply graph analysis and visualizations as well as natural language analysis over a database of over 11,000 artworks in order to address three types of questions related, respectively, to the formation and sustainability of large cultures, the semantic content of the network we analyze, and the role of art as an institution that contributes to sustain large-scale societies. The results also help to design a methodology that can be exported to other projects in Digital Humanities