Painters' Palettes

How to read this visualization

This chart shows the color palettes of some of my favourite painters, from the medieval Bosch to the modern Picasso. The painters are shown from top to bottom in chronological order of birth (Bosch is the first, Picasso the last). If you hover over the name of the painter, a little biography shows up:

For each painter I chose ten paintings (pretty much arbitrarily) from his works, and arranged them in chronological order, from left to right. Thus, the left side shows, for each painter, his earlier paintings, and the right side shows his last paintings.

For each painting the chart shows, as brush strokes, the five predominant colors. For determining the dominant colors I used Palette Generator, a web service that uses a k-mean algorithm to create a color palette based on the predominant colors in the painting. Hover over each block of five brush strokes to see the correspondent painting and some additional information:

Also, given the five predominant colors, the brush strokes are organized in order from top to bottom: the top stroke is the main color, and the bottom one is the 5^th predominant color.

Source of the texts, dates and images: Wikipedia.