Data and stimuli of the experiment: Facial expressions in Nativity and Pieta paintings from 1037 to 1840

This study explores the development of depicting facial expressions in historical paintings depicting pivotal religious scenes: the Nativity (Birth of Christ) and the Pietà (Death of Christ). By examining artworks spanning the 11th to the 19th century, we assessed how do depictions evolve over time in terms of polarity, agreeability and ambiguity of individual faces and compared these with the perceived emotional intensity of overall pictorial scene.A total of 56 paintings were randomly selected for evaluation by 150 participants. Each participant categorized all visible faces into one of ten emotion categories—ranging from joy and love to sadness and anger—and then rated the painting’s overall emotional intensity. We quantified the degree of viewer agreement (agreeability), calculated a polarity measure (positive vs. negative emotion balance) and ambiguity (amount of chosen categories) at the face level. We also measured how participants perceived each painting’s emotional intensity.