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Writing not long after the death of Leonardo da Vinci, art historian and biographer Giorgio Vasari described the late master’s “Mona Lisa,” placing special emphasis on the lady’s uncanny simper. “And in this work of Leonardo’s there was a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold; and it was held to be something marvelous, since the reality was not more alive,” he wrote. The sublime expression of “La Joconde?...
...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. Laying one famous enigma to rest, however, calls up a host of other questions: what more...
Takahisa Nakamura, the first author of the study and a research fellow at HSPH, calls their work “the first step...
...with consciousness and subconsciousness,” says Frank Fehrenbach, Professor of History of Art and Architecture. “What are you testing? What is your primary material? All these people [researchers] start with vocal response from their test persons. If you develop ideas about how art works on us then you determine that art must work on us in a certain...
...hand, Fehrenbach argues that asking subjects to respond to a work of art to analyze what’s happening in the brain can’t offer anything more than simple questions to an audience or to oneself. On the other hand, he stresses that this type of research-oriented approach is only a new substitute for formalism and places an undue emphasis on immediate response. Neurological or psychological studies could easily fall short in explaining such instantaneous reactions. If scientists observe that subjects have similar responses to a work of art, can they necessarily prove that similar mental...