The Secret behind the Secret behind Mona Lisa's Smile

“The smile on the face of the Mona Lisa is so enigmatic that it disappears when it is looked at directly, says a US scientist.

Professor Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University said the smile only became apparent when the viewer looked at other parts of the painting.

The Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the 1500s, has intrigued art lovers for five centuries because of its subject's mysterious smile.

The theory has been presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, this week.

The smile disappeared when it was looked at because of the way the human eye processes visual information, said Prof Livingstone.

The eye uses two types of vision, foveal and peripheral.

Foveal, or direct vision, is excellent at picking up detail but is less suited to picking up shadows.

"The elusive quality of the Mona Lisa's smile can be explained by the fact that her smile is almost entirely in low spatial frequencies, and so is seen best by your peripheral vision," Prof Livingstone said.

The more a person stares fixedly ahead, the less useful is their peripheral vision.

Prof Livingstone said the best example of this effect was if someone was to stare at a letter on a page of print.

Concentrating on one letter made it difficult to pick out other letters even a short distance away, Prof Livingstone said.

She said the same principle was used by da Vinci on the painting. The smile only became apparent if a viewer looked at her eyes or elsewhere on her face….”

BBC: Mona Lisa Smile Secrets Revealed.

Personally, the smile in question is quite ‘apparent’ to myself even when I look directly, or ‘fovealy’, at Lisa’s lips.

Perhaps the degree to which one attempts to appreciate the detail in all aspects of life...

…impacts on the degree to which one is able to detect ‘shadows’ even when looking at things directly, whether it be in paintings or in life itself.  This, I suppose, is one of the reasons why I never found Mona (mona’ – ‘lady’, ‘madam’) Lisa’s smile ‘enigmatic’. 

Perhaps it is such a relatively more pronounced appreciation of detail…

..that led me to use a magnifying glass to ‘scratch’ in details in some drawings that I did in my late teens.  For some reason, still unbeknownst to myself, I realised than that that which is not immediately observable (by the current version of the ‘human mind’) has a greater impact on the mind than that which is.  It is these between-the-lines and barely visually perceptible details that gave the picture an ‘aura’ or the viewer a particular ‘feeling’ upon looking at it from a distance.  (I claim no credit for this realisation as I’m still trying to detect the external source/s that led to ‘my’ realising this.)

Thus, if we are inclined to view madam Lisa’s smile as ‘enigmatic’,

…this might actually be symptomatic of a perspectival deficiency on our part that leads to an inability to appreciate the ‘shadows’ that found ‘modern’ ‘life’ and ‘reality’.  It is this that I consider a true ‘disability’, ‘retarded’ or ‘nerdy’.  And, I suppose, it is this gross disability on the part of the masses that still leads them to view the wheelchair-bound, ‘blind’, ‘deaf’, etc, as ‘disabled’; disables their ability to appreciate the true causes behind terrorism, poverty, aids, catastrophes and wars; leads them to form long queues or go ‘goo goo’ for the latest ‘Harry Potter’ book and film;  make box-office hits out of arachnoid or spandex-clad ‘superheroes’; worship ‘celebrities’ and view them as a part of The Solution as opposed to a part of The Problem; confuse their professionalism in a particular job for professionalism in life; think that the ability to cast an opinion is indicative of its quality as opposed to its logical and rational content; and, not forgetting, thinking Mona Lisa’s smile, ‘enigmatic’ as opposed to such thoughts being indicative of some deficiency on their part.

Methinks we are living in an Age of Foveal Vision.

It takes the belief that ‘we have arrived’ @ ‘modernity’ to exacerbate all round ‘foveal vision’.  That is when we will cease to appreciate the ‘detail’ comprising reality, and appreciate things on a surface, as opposed to ‘foundational’, level.  S/he who does not see the shadows is condemned to live in it.  I think the penchant for greater use of acronyms, abbreviations, words such as ‘cool’, ‘nerd’, and the propensity to appreciate brief and to-the-point statements, amongst a host of others, are symptoms of such a Foveal mindset.  Where reality is taken as a given, the human mind moves on to abbreviating it in a myriad of ways for quicker understanding so that it can move on to acting within it.  This is indicative of a decrease in the perceived need to scrutinise the foundations of our existence.  The idea of, and believing that ‘we have arrived’ @ ‘modern times’ itself absolves humanity of the need to question it.   In fact, I think the symbol '@' is itself most apt in illustrating the reduced perspectival persona of 'modern' humanity.

ed-infinitum