  As subjective artistic creations, artistic paintings carry emotion of their
creators. Emotions expressed in paintings and emotion aroused in spectators by
paintings are two kinds of emotions that scholars have paid attention to.
Traditional studies on emotions expressed by paintings are mainly conducted
from qualitative perspectives, with neither quantitative output on the
emotional values of a painting, nor exploration of trends in the expression of
emotion in art history. In this research we threat facial expressions in
paintings as an artistic characteristics of art history and employ cognitive
computation technology to identify the facial emotions in paintings and to
investigate the quantitative measures of paintings from three emotion-related
aspects: the spatial and temporal patterns of painting emotions in art history,
the gender difference on the emotion of paintings and the color preference
associated with emotions. We discovered that the emotion of happiness has a
growing trend from ancient to modern times in paintings history, and men and
women have different facial expressions patterns along time. As for color
preference, artists with different culture backgrounds had similar association
preferences between colors and emotions.
