On the nature of the background behind Mona Lisa
One of the many questions surrounding Leonardo’s Mona Lisa concerns the landscape visible in the portrait’s background: Does it depict an imagination of Leonardo’s mind, a real world landscape or the motif of a plane canvas that hung in Leonardo’s studio, behind the sitter? By analyzing divergences between the Mona Lisa and her Prado double that was painted in parallel but from another perspective the authors found mathematical evidence for the motif-canvas hypothesis: The landscape in the Prado version is 10% increased but otherwise nearly identical with the Louvre one, which indicates both painters used the same plane motif-canvas as reference.
Stable aesthetic standards delusion: changing 'artistic quality' by elaboration.
The present study challenges the notion that judgments of artistic quality are based on stable aesthetic standards. We propose that such standards are a delusion and that judgments of artistic quality are the combined result of exposure, elaboration, and discourse. We ran two experiments using elaboration tasks based on the repeated evaluation technique in which different versions of the Mona Lisa had to be elaborated deeply. During the initial task either the version known from the Louvre or an alternative version owned by the Prado was elaborated; during the second task both versions were elaborated in a comparative fashion. After both tasks multiple blends of the two versions had to be …
Cross-ethnic assessment of body weight and height on the basis of faces
Abstract Previous research has revealed a strong relationship between mere visual facial cues and body weight. They can be exploited to validly judge the weight of the human body. We tested to what extent observers are able to judge body weight and height on the basis of same-ethnicity and different-ethnicity faces. Caucasian and Asian observers saw Caucasian and Asian faces and estimated the person’s weight and height – merely on the basis of greyscale photographs of the face. These height and weight estimates were influenced by ethnocentric specifics of familiar face proportion and face–body relationship. Own-ethnicity weight estimations showed higher accuracy than foreign-ethnicity estim…
Judging body weight from faces: the height-weight illusion.
Being able to exploit features of the human face to predict health and fitness can serve as an evolutionary advantage. Surface features such as facial symmetry, averageness, and skin colour are known to influence attractiveness. We sought to determine whether observers are able to extract more complex features, namely body weight. If possible, it could be used as a predictor for health and fitness. For instance, facial adiposity could be taken to indicate a cardiovascular challenge or proneness to infections. Observers seem to be able to glean body weight information from frontal views of a face. Is weight estimation robust across different viewing angles? We showed that participants stron…
DaVinci's Mona Lisa entering the next dimension.
For several of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, such as The Virgin and Child with St Anne or the Mona Lisa, there exist copies produced by his own studio. In case of the Mona Lisa, a quite exceptional, rediscovered studio copy was presented to the public in 2012 by the Prado Museum in Madrid. Not only does it mirror its famous counterpart superficially; it also features the very same corrections to the lower layers, which indicates that da Vinci and the ‘copyist’ must have elaborated their panels simultaneously. On the basis of subjective (thirty-two participants estimated painter-model constellations) as well as objective data (analysis of trajectories between landmarks of both paintings), …