About

Look first. Then place, date, and attribute.

A game is a five-painting encounter. The title, artist, date, and museum remain out of view until all three judgments are committed.

1. I · VBI
   Geography

   Place the painting at the most precise level its evidence supports: city, region, or country.

   3,000
2. II · QVANDO
   Date

   Estimate a year. The accepted catalogue interval earns full credit; points then fall with distance.

   3,000
3. III · QVIS
   Attribution

   Name the artist or school while respecting qualifiers such as workshop of, circle of, or after.

   3,000

Each judgment is worth 3,000 points: 9,000 per painting and 45,000 per game. Date scoring measures distance from the accepted interval. Attribution scoring recognizes common name forms, modest spelling errors, and qualified relationships, and gives partial credit for a documented relative of the artist or a more specific school that fits the museum’s. Where the wider scholarly view differs from a museum’s label, the game also accepts it in reviewed cases and shows it on the reveal. This is a scoring rule, not a view on the attribution. The reveal explains the score, shows accepted alternatives, and links back to the museum record.

Ten collections, one reviewed corpus.

The game uses fixed snapshots of the participating museums’ catalogues rather than allowing a live catalogue change to rewrite a round in progress.

These museums were chosen because they publish reusable collection data and images at meaningful scale, retain stable object identities and catalogue links, and offer complementary European painting holdings. Together they also test the same research method across different APIs, vocabularies, and cataloguing traditions without weakening the project’s rights or evidence standards.

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York1,646
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland388
• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago540
• National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.1,004
• SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen756
• J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles353
• Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven406
• Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main422
• Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis233
• Nationalmuseum, Stockholm665

Rights, image, object-type, date, European-scope, and geography rules are applied collection by collection. Qualified attributions remain qualified, ambiguous records are excluded, and closely related works are prevented from appearing together too frequently. Admissions, exclusions, sources, and transformations remain auditable, and every published work has complete, scorable geography.

Method

Reproducibility

Source captures, normalized records, research decisions, boundaries, and generated gameplay files carry recorded hashes. Automated checks rebuild the geography and scoring artifacts before release.

Production place, at evidence-supported precision.

Nationality, birthplace, travel, subject matter, provenance, and place of death may be relevant context, but none independently establishes where a painting was made.

The resolver compares museum records with matched artist identities, dated RKD activity, selected Wikidata alignment, and object- or series-specific scholarship. A more precise answer is required only when every full-credit alternative supports it; genuine alternatives can all receive credit.

Gameplay uses present-day labels and generalized modern boundaries as a consistent scoring instrument. They are not claims about historical sovereignty, cultural identity, or the exact extent of an early modern polity.

Stable play and inspectable results.

The application preserves source evidence, makes transformations explicit, and keeps authoritative scoring on the server.

The visible map uses Leaflet, MapLibre, OpenFreeMap, OpenMapTiles, OpenStreetMap data, and Natural Earth relief. Separate versioned Natural Earth geometry controls scoring, so a visual tile change cannot alter an answer. Optional Google sign-in carries progress between devices while retaining only Google’s account-specific identifier; the public identity remains the username chosen in the game. See the privacy policy for details.

Where the project goes next.

The next phase is deeper research, stronger study tools, and careful growth without lowering the evidentiary standard.

Proposed research remains outside gameplay until it is reviewed, accepted, regenerated, and tested for a planned release. Data and scoring geometry carry versions and hashes, and completed rounds are not retroactively recalculated.

Made possible by public collections.

VBI · QVANDO · QVIS is an independent educational project and is not affiliated with, operated by, or endorsed by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, the J. Paul Getty Museum or Getty Trust, Yale University or the Yale University Art Gallery, the Städel Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Nationalmuseum, the Wikimedia Foundation, RKD, or any of the mapping and infrastructure providers whose resources it uses. Their open-access initiatives make the game possible, and their catalogue records remain the primary references for the works included. The project was initially inspired by Anthropeum, a game centered on objects from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, but has evolved substantially over the course of its development. We are grateful to the many friends and colleagues who have tested the game, offered feedback, and provided corrections. We welcome further corrections and look forward to continuing to improve and expand the project.