Leonardo's 'quick eye' may be key to Mona Lisa's magnetism:
Scientists believe Leonardo da Vinci's super-fast eye may have helped him catch the enigmatic magic of Mona Lisa's smile.
This superhuman trait, which top tennis and baseball players may also share, allowed the Renaissance master to capture accurately minute, fleeting expressions and even birds and dragonflies in flight.
Art historians have long talked of Leonardo's "quick eye", but David S Thaler of Switzerland's University of Basel has tried to gauge it in a new study published Thursday alongside another paper showing how he gave his drawings and paintings uncanny emotional depth.
Professor Thaler's research turns on how Leonardo's eye was so keen he managed to spot that the front and back wings of a dragonfly are out of synch—a discovery which took slow-motion photography to prove four centuries later.
The artist, who lived from 1452 to 1519, sketched how when a dragonfly's front wings are raised, the hind ones are lowered, something that was a blur to Thaler and to his colleagues when they tried to observe the difference themselves.
Thaler told AFP that this gift to see what few humans can may be the secret of Leonardo's most famous painting.
"Mona Lisa's smile is so enigmatic because it represents the moment of breaking into a smile. And Leonardo's quick eye captured that and held it," he said.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday June 24 2020, @01:29PM (1 child)
If I am to guess, he have not really seen it with his eyes, but was smart enough to realize that it is a better flying technique. Once one believes, he often actually starts to see it.
Another example is how horses run. Even though pretty much everybody can see how they move their legs, all the artists were painting them wrong up to a certain time. They believed wrong and so saw it.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @02:20PM
Wrong? Horses have multiple options for gait, here are some, claimed to be the first identified photographically,
https://www.amnh.org/explore/ology/zoology/horse-gaits-flipbooks-walk-trot-and-gallop [amnh.org]
From horse country (Kentucky), here is more detail including differentiating natural and artificial gaits (trained and/or bred),
https://www.myhorseuniversity.com/single-post/2017/09/25/Natural-and-Artificial-Gaits-of-the-Horse [myhorseuniversity.com]