Live · Period 2026-10 – present
Painting History Lab
Western painting history, read with sources and confidence grades
A static site for reading the history of Western painting by moving between nine axes: painters, movements, periods, questions, places, world events, works, subjects and terms. All 208 claims carry a source, a confidence grade and a confirmation date, and anything that could not be confirmed is shown as “not included” or “unconfirmed”. Each page ends with links that hand a sourced question to ChatGPT, Grok or Perplexity; there is no chat inside the site.
What AI handles
Opens the source pages, extracts facts and a short quotation, and assigns a confidence grade. Also builds the site and checks it for broken links and layout problems.
What a person decides
Sets the rule to publish primary information only and to add nothing that cannot be confirmed, and decides the site name and whether to lift noindex and go public.
Figures
| Coverage (painters, claims, sources)as of 2026-10 | 30 painters (Picasso plus 29), 208 claims, 140 sources |
|---|---|
| Relations, works, pagesas of 2026-10 | 54 relations, 72 works (53 of them with museum records), 221 pages |
| Confidence split (208 claims)as of 2026-10 | A 0 / B 180 / C 27 / unconfirmed 1 |
Hypothesis
If art history can be read by moving between painters, movements and periods, and each claim carries a source, a confidence grade and a confirmation date, beginners and AI may find it easier to follow and cite. The site has only just been made public, and neither reading behavior nor AI citations have been measured yet.
Learnings
- Confidence grades are shown, not hidden. Values that rest only on Wikidata stay at C, and only what could be checked in a museum record such as the Met’s artist field was raised to B; that is how the birth and death dates and places of 12 painters went from C to B. At public release the 208 claims split into 180 B, 27 C and 1 unconfirmed, with none at A (the artist’s own words).
- Where no source turned up, nothing was added. The Met describes Rembrandt only as a Dutch Golden Age painter, none of the Met and Tate pages searched ties him to a movement such as the Baroque, and the Rijksmuseum page is drawn with JavaScript so its text could not be read. He is listed as “not included” rather than added at C on Wikidata alone.
- Museums that blocked access were not worked around. When the additions were fetched, the Art Institute of Chicago API stopped at a Cloudflare challenge, so that batch went unused. Wikidata’s “Hiroshige was influenced by Hokusai” has no reference attached, so the site shows it as unconfirmed.
- Images are limited to what the museum API confirms as public domain. The 19 on the site are 18 from the Met Open Access program (CC0) and 1 from Wikimedia Commons; for Matisse, Dalí, Warhol, Derain and others the Met’s works are not public domain, so those pages say “no image”.
- A pre-release check found that searching “モネ” (Monet) returned nothing. Wikidata’s Japanese and English labels and aliases now feed the search as helper data, so hiragana, katakana, spelling variants and English names also match. The aliases are used only for search, never as factual claims.
- Just before going public, every page turned out to lack a canonical link and og:url carried a .html suffix. After the fix, the canonical URLs of all 221 pages match the 221 URLs in the sitemap. The noindex header rule also missed the bare /painting-history when written as /painting-history/*, so it became /painting-history*.
- The site is served from its own Worker and the existing sakimyto.com Worker was left untouched. Responses before and after confirmed that a Route takes priority over the Custom Domain, and /, /lab, /sitemap.xml and /robots.txt answer as they did before. Rolling back means deleting two Routes. The first release was noindex, and the tag was removed only after the checks passed.
Stack
Astro 5 / Pagefind / Cloudflare Workers