Mona Lisa

By: Molly Doak

Mona Lisa  (1503–1517) 77 cm × 53 cm Oil on poplar

A deep and resonate depiction of one of his greatest accomplishments. The contours of her face, hands and body are rendered with the utmost sensitivity, so that the convex merges with the concave in a continuous movement. The use of sfumato technique blends light and dark and one form with another to enhance the unity of the composition. The unidentified woman gently turns to recognize the presence of the viewer with a slight smile-the subject of endless speculation.  

What strikes us most is the amazing degree to which the Mona Lisa looks alive. She really seems to look at us and have a mind of her own. Like a living being she seems to change before our eyes and to look a little different every time we come back to her.

Look at her mouth and then at the background. Look at her mouth again and then her eyes. Look back and forth between her mouth and other parts of the painting. As you do this you might realize that her smile seems most apparent and cheerful when looking away from it and it seems less evident when looking directly at it.

I wanted to approach this painting from a different perspective that Leonardo himself might find interesting; a scientific perspective. Margaret Livingstone, a neurophysiologist with a longstanding interest in art and its relation to visual neurobiology, examined this work and shed light to the physiological aspects that occur when we look the Mona Lisa.

Apparently, we have a surprisingly low visual acuity (resolution) in parts of the visual field that are not at the center of where we are looking-the center of the gaze. The fact that our vision hast the highest acuity in the center of gaze does not mean that the vision in the rest of the visual field is inferior-it’s just used for different things.

Foveal vision is used for scrutinizing highly detailed objects or surfaces whereas peripheral vision is used for organizing the spatial scene, for seeing large objects, and for detecting areas to which we should direct our foveal vision. Our foveal vision is optimized for the fine details and our peripheral vision is optimized for coarser information...it can actually see things our central vision cant.

The fact that her expression changed systematically with how far the center gaze is from her mouth suggests her lifelike quality might not be so mysterious after all but rather that her smile must be differentially apparent in the different ranges of details characteristic of the different parts of the visual field.

This means that if you look at this painting so that your center of gaze falls on the background or her hands, Mona Lisa’s mouth- which is then seen by your peripheral vision-appears more cheerful than when you look at it directly, when it is seen but your fine detail center gaze.

This explains her elusive quality; you literally can’t catch her smile by looking at it!