Search results for "Mona lisa"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Differentiating the differential rotation effect.
2011
As an observer views a picture from different viewing angles, objects in the picture appear to maintain their orientation relative to the observer. For instance, the eyes of a portrait appear to follow the observer as he or she views the image from different angles. We have explored this rotation effect, often called the Mona Lisa effect. We report three experiments that used portrait photographs to test variations of the Mona Lisa effect. The first experiment introduced picture displacements relative to the observer in directions beyond the horizontal plane. The Mona Lisa effect remained robust for vertical and/or diagonal observer displacements. The experiment also included conditions in …
DaVinci's Mona Lisa entering the next dimension.
2013
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), …
The Mona Lisa effect: Testing the limits of perceptual robustness vis-à-vis slanted images
2014
We report three experiments that test the limits of the Mona Lisa effect. The gaze of a portrait that is looking at us appears to follow us around as we move with respect to the picture. Even if our position is shifted considerably to the side, or if the picture is severely slanted, do we feel the gaze to be directed at us? We determined the threshold where this effect breaks down to be maximally 70? of picture slant relative to the observer. Different factors modulate this remarkable robustness, among them being the display medium and the nature of the picture. The threshold was considerably lower when the picture was mounted on a physical surface as opposed to a computer simulation of sla…
On the nature of the background behind Mona Lisa
2015
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.