Word: artful
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Livingstone is far from alone in her exploration of the science animating works of art. Many of her colleagues, including some at Harvard, pursue similar interests; they channel their curiosity about human visual perception into an artistic study or use scientific findings to explain some of the fundamental principles that underlie works of art. The Vision Sciences Laboratory, located in William James Hall and run by a group of psychology professors, explores this very chiasm in their experiments—though their approach is slightly different than Livingstone?...
Enter Dr. Margaret S. Livingstone, Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, whose research focuses on human visual perception. Livingstone realized that while contemporary art historians like Ernst Gombrich are not wrong in their analysis of “Mona Lisa,” there’s a science to da Vinci’s masterpiece that had yet to be fully explained. Analyzing the work in terms of its spatial frequencies, Livingstone revealed that the lower spatial frequencies, best seen by the peripheral vision, make the figure appear to smile, while at higher frequencies the smile almost vanishes...
Through a careful survey of many works of art, confirmed by experiments on perception, Cavanagh has discovered that the only requirements for realistic depictions of shadows are that they be transparent and darker than their immediate surroundings. He has shown that reflections, like shadows, are a mystery to the human mind; their representation in art has but a few of the limitations which govern reality. He maintains, in a similar vein as Livingstone, that Impressionist art is so appealing because intentional blurring may connect representations more directly to emotional centers in the brain rather than to conscious image-recognition areas...
Livingstone had a similar revelation early in her career. “I began to realize that artists, just like scientists, are doing experiments, and that a number of works of art reveal important things about how we see,” she says...
Even while artists act like scientists and scientists like art historians, it is not easy to decipher the role the sciences should play in the expansive field of art history. While Cavanagh maintains that an understanding of human visual perception is helpful and informative in—if not essential to—the study of art, Livingstone understands that barriers do exist. While some scientific developments, like fractal analysis, have already swept the world of art history, she claims, others may not be accepted so easily by art historians. “Anything innovative takes time to be understood...