(20) Benjamin Binstock's digital connoisseurship

The art historian Benjamin Binstock has been working with large sets of digital photographs to examine paintings by Rembrandt and artists who have been confused with Rembrandt (shown here) and also the artist Vermeer and an "unknown apprentice." The idea is that having a set of photographs reproduced to the same scale is helpful for making comparisons and seeing patterns. A new book titled Vermeer's Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery and the Unknown Apprentice, which will be published in 2008, will include according to the publisher "a remarkable color gatefold spread that presents the entirety of Vermeer’s oeuvre arranged in chronological order in 1/20 scale, demonstrating the relative size of the paintings over the artist’s career." The photo shown here is from a short discussion online of a project for Rembrandt photographs.
This kind of comparison seems especially useful for the paintings that are usually attributed to Hieronymus Bosch, particularly since for instance The Garden of Earthly Delights and the Lisbon Temptations of Saint Anthony have never been exhibited together in the same place.
For this project and for the time being I will be using a simplified version of Binstock's method since it is not easy to make sure that pictures really are exactly to the same scale. For instance, it is not easy to tell whether published dimensions refer to the size of the picture, the size of the panel, or the size of the picture plus the frame, and the measurements of the tapestries must be approximate. I will be using published dimensions and resizing images in Photoshop Elements 2.0 so that one pixel=one millimeter. The composites posted here will have to be further scaled down since the tapestries are very large.