Hyperactive’82

Posted by
Ziwei

Posted On
Jul 16 2009 11:00 am

A friend of mine come back from a very satisfying tour from Europe recently and start to describe to me how eerie the painting of Mona Lisa at Musée du Louvre is. “The eyes follow you around no matter which angle you are viewing it from” he said. This phenomenon has to do with the way a painting is created and the lack of third-dimensional on a 2-dimension surface such as a canvas. The key mechanism at work here is perspective.

Linear perspective, a form of rule applied on paintings and drawings to create the illusion of space and distance on a flat surface by having lines converges on a single focus point on the canvas has been in use by modern artist since the 14th century. Prior to that, artists mainly make use of the different in size and height to illustrate the concept of distance and space and early Egyptian and Chinese painting are good examples of such technique. Shadow and light is another form of technique that artists use to create the illusion of a third dimension or depth on a canvas as objects at different distance from a viewer will be perceived as having different value of shadow and highlight depending on the objects’ distance from any available light source.

Making use of shadow, light and perspective, artists are able to produce very lifelike and realistic artworks with very lifelike portrayal of depth. However this depth is nothing more than a optical illusion, and this illusion will give rise to another illusion — the eye that follow you around.

In real life, when you look at a person looking straight in his face and then start to shift the angle at which you look at him, his eye will continue to look ahead and not at you. The perspective, light and shadow of the view in front of you (”the canvas”) change all the while you are shifting your viewing angle. However on painting such as Mona Lisa, elements of perspective and light and shadow are fixed and don’t change, they look pretty much the same no matter from what angle you look at it. Therefore as long as the artist’s intention is to have the subject of the painting look straight at the viewer, a painting such as Mona Lisa with her eye following you intensely will result as our brain will interpret the painting as such regardless of the viewing angle.