Painting has played a major role in human expression, evolving subject to a complex interplay of representational conventions, social interactions, and a process of historization. From individual qualitative work of art historians emerges a metanarrative that remains difficult to evaluate in its validity regarding emergent macroscopic and underlying microscopic dynamics. The full scope of granular data, the summary statistics, and consequently, also their bias simply lie beyond the cognitive limit of individual qualitative human scholarship. Yet, a more quantitative understanding is still lacking, driven by a lack of data and a persistent dominance of qualitative scholarship in art history. Here, we show that quantitative analyses of creative processes in landscape painting can shed light, provide a systematic verification, and allow for questioning the emerging metanarrative. Using a quasicanonical benchmark dataset of 14,912 landscape paintings, covering a period from the Western renaissance to contemporary art, we systematically analyze the evolution of compositional proportion via a simple yet coherent information-theoretic dissection method that captures iterations of the dominant horizontal and vertical partition directions. Tracing frequency distributions of seemingly preferred compositions across several conceptual dimensions, we find that dominant dissection ratios can serve as a meaningful signature to capture the unique compositional characteristics and systematic evolution of individual artist bodies of work, creation date time spans, and conventional style periods, while concepts of artist nationality remain problematic. Network analyses of individual artists and style periods clarify their rhizomatic confusion while uncovering three distinguished yet nonintuitive supergroups that are meaningfully clustered in time.

绘画在人类表达中扮演着重要角色，随着代表惯例，社会互动和历史化过程的复杂相互作用而演变。从艺术史家的个人定性工作中，出现了一种元叙事，对于新兴的宏观和潜在微观动力学，其有效性仍然难以评估。粒状数据的全部范围，摘要统计以及因此的偏差也完全超出了个人定性人类学术知识的认知范围。然而，由于缺乏数据以及艺术史上定性学术的持续统治，仍然缺乏更定量的理解。在这里，我们证明了对山水画创作过程的定量分析可以阐明，提供系统的验证，并允许质疑新兴的叙事。我们使用14912幅山水画的准基准数据集，涵盖了从西方文艺复兴时期到当代艺术的一段时期，我们通过一种简单而又连贯的信息理论解剖方法，系统地分析了成分比例的演变，该方法捕获了主要的水平和垂直分区方向的迭代。在几个概念维度上追踪看似优选的作品的频率分布，我们发现占优势的解剖比例可以作为有意义的特征，以捕捉艺术家个人作品的独特组成特征和系统演变，创作日期时间跨度和传统风格时期，而艺术家国籍的概念仍然存在问题。