Every painting is passed through a CLIP image model (ViT-B/32, open-source) that turns the picture into a 512-number vector capturing what it looks like — composition, palette, subject, handling — with no captions or labels involved. Two works are “similar” when their vectors point the same way (cosine similarity); that drives Visually closest and Painters nearest this work in each painting’s card.

This map lays all embedded works out in 2-D with t-SNE, so visually alike paintings land near each other. The dots can be coloured by painter, period or school — or by each work’s own dominant colour (the average of its pixels), captured while embedding. Painters nearest this work and the “If you like … try” chips average a painter’s vectors into one “fingerprint” and compare fingerprints.

Everything is computed offline and shipped as small precomputed files — the page itself runs no AI. Coverage grows as more works are embedded. Images © their sources via Wikimedia Commons.