The samples were collected from paintings with different geographical origins (Peru and Egypt) made with different pigments, were several centuries old, underwent severe ageing conditions, due to temperature and humidity variations, and were subject to different conservation campaigns.
They were particularly taken with the way a perfume expert matched paintings to different scents.
He put them in a chamber, one at a time, and showed each a pair of paintings by different artists.
And because daylight changes, too, the paintings look different depending on the time of day and the weather.
Here are 400 beautiful, modest postcard-sized paintings of different varieties of apple, by Bavarian pastor and artist Korbinian Aigner.
Unlike the Munich pictures, which for all their wonderfulness are somewhat repetitive, these paintings are different every time out.
At the Gagosian Madison Avenue flagship, the display of 74 Hirst paintings in different spaces really should count as four shows, and two are definitely for Hirst-maniacs only.
What's more, six Vermeer paintings are different viewpoints of the same room, and all have been done on the same size canvas.
Liset Baños makes paintings in different shades of blue, which cannot help but make them otherworldly; the imagery is reminiscent of early Marc Chagall.
But the artist kept doing the morgue pictures anyway, with increasing conceptual sophistication and a half-abstract, gestural fluidity that links them to other paintings with different subjects.
