The Vienna Art Picture System (VAPS): A Data Set of 999 Paintings and Subjective Ratings for Art and Aesthetics Research

In empirical aesthetics, choosing stimuli, especially artworks, is a persistent challenge. Artworks differ largely in terms of style, complexity, formal features, and valence, as well as historical context, presentation quality, genre, and content, all of which might influence aesthetic experiences. To advance the comparability of studies and increase our understanding of studied effects, it is important that the research community develops and, ideally, utilizes common standards or even data sets for stimulus selection. Here, we present the Vienna Art Picture System (VAPS), which provides such a comprehensive data set of visual artistic stimuli consisting of 999 fine art paintings from 347 European painters and from 13 art historical periods/styles from 1434 to the beginning of the 21st century. The artworks correspond to five genre categories: scenes, portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and paintings with increasing levels of abstraction. As a base for future research, the data set contains rating information (based on a German-speaking student sample of 60 women and 60 men) on five variables: liking, emotional valence, emotional arousal, visual complexity, and familiarity. The VAPS is freely accessible to the scientific community for noncommercial use at https://osf.io/a7xcr/. Thus, the VAPS offers a normed (mean, standard deviation) set of fine art pictures that can be used as a tool for researchers in the field of empirical visual aesthetics, and experimental psychology, to select stimulus sets suited to their needs and that can provide a basis for more standardized and comparable research across individual laboratories and researchers in the rapidly expanding assessment of experiences with art.