"Mona Lisa's smile"


During my visit to the Louvre, I have witnessed the many Mona Lisa’s fans!! Although, there were many extraordinary paintings in the Louvre that I would have taken my hat off if I had one, yet the great crowed was around the Mona Lisa's painting!!!

As we all may know that The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci in the 1500s. Because of its mysterious smile, the painting has intrigued art lovers for five centuries as the most famous portrait of all times which is displayed at the Louvre in Paris. Yes, it was the smile on Mona Lisa’s face that mostly made the painting so famous. In addition, all the stories being mentioned behind the origin of the portrait to whether was male of female made it a subject of the international interest! The Professor Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University said “The smile only became apparent when the viewer looked at other parts of the painting.” Also, Prof Livingstone said” The smile disappeared when it was looked at because of the way the human eye processes visual information” He continued saying” "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 our peripheral vision." It seems that the more a person stares fixedly ahead, the less useful is their peripheral vision. Prof Livingstone also used French painter Monet's Impression: Sunrise, which features a dazzling orange sun in a blue sky, to show how artists had understood human sight.

The secret behind Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile has been explained by scientists who believe that it changes depending on which part of the eye sees it first. One of the charms of the world's most famous painting is that she appears radiant one moment and then serious and sardonic the next. Now scientists have come up with an answer to her changing moods saying that our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain. They believe that Mona Lisa's smile depends on what cells in the retina pick up the image and what channel the image is transmitted through in the brain. Sometimes one channel wins over the other and you see the smile and other times you do not see the smile said Dr Luis Martinez. Different cells in the eye are designed to pick up different colors, contrasts, backgrounds and foregrounds. Some deal with central vision while others with peripheral. These channels encode data about an object's size, clarity, brightness and location in the visual field.

Dr Martinez Otero's team used volunteers to compare how light affects our judgment of Mona Lisa's smile. Two kinds of cells determine the brightness of an object relative to its surroundings - "on-centre" cells, which are stimulated only when their centers are illuminated and allow us to see a bright star in a dark night; and "off-centre" cells, which turn on only when their centers are dark and allow us to pick out words on a printed page.

Eye gaze also affects how volunteers see the smile, Martinez Otero says “His team used software to track where in the painting 20 volunteers gazed while they rated whether or not Mona Lisa's smile became more or less apparent.” With a minute to gaze at the painting, volunteers tended to focus on the left side of her mouth when judging her as smiling – further evidence that dead-centre vision picks out the smile. When volunteers had only a fraction of a second to discern her smile, their eyes tended to focus on her left cheek, hinting that peripheral vision plays a role, too.

So did Leonardo intend to initiate so much confusion in the brains of viewers, not to mention scientists? Absolutely, Martinez Otero contends wrote in one of his notebooks that he was trying to paint dynamic expressions because that's what he saw in the street." The research was originally presented at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago.

This isn't the first time scientists have deconstructed Leonardo Da Vinci's masterpiece. In 2000, Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School who had a side interest in the art history, showed that Mona Lisa's smile is more apparent in peripheral vision Movie Camera than dead-center vision.

We can say the same thing about the motion of the face. There are more muscles in the face than in any other part of the body, to capture all the fine emotions that we are capable of analyzing. The part of the brain that decodes these projections back into emotions is also a very complex and well-developed organ. In principle, facial muscles can also be captured in mid-motion. What Da Vinci accomplished with Mona Lisa was difficult, her facial muscles reflect a dynamic face in motion, not one of someone statically holding a half-smile.

Da Vinci’s accomplishments in each of these areas; arts, sciences and engineering, earned him the reputation of a Renaissance man. There is triumvirate of Da Vinci's passions clearer than in his study of the human body in motion. Da Vinci had the ability to unify his talents from the three different areas which are unsurpassed to this day. Beneath the skin of Da Vinci's subjects are muscles and bones depicted with astonishing accuracy. Da Vinci was a genius and uniquely qualified to capture the mesmerizing effect of Mona Lisa's smile that grasped the Louvre visitors crowding up around his panting!

Now, who has the smile of Mona Lisa’s?

Mona but not Lisa

©Mona Youssef - Realist fine artist