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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: 3, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday June 24 2020, @03:24PM (6 children)
Am I the only one to find the woman in this painting really rather plain - if not downright ugly?
It seems to be in good taste to find her image to be the pinnacle of feminine beauty, but I wouldn't want to hang that painting in my home if you offered it to me...
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @03:58PM (3 children)
You are not the original audience! Here's one very cursory tour of what beauty meant through the ages,
https://www.visagemedart.com/brief-history-of-feminine-beauty/ [visagemedart.com]
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday June 24 2020, @04:50PM (2 children)
Yes but the praise comes from people of today. Therefore that ugly woman is apparently considered beautiful by today's standards too. How anyone can find her beautiful is beyond me - or even enigmatic, she just looks dumb or stoned out of her mind to me.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 24 2020, @09:09PM (1 child)
One man's meat, is another man's poison.
I never thought she was very good looking. However - weren't there five women used to make that painting? Something I heard somewhere, maybe true, maybe not. If so, there was no Mona Lisa, the painting only epitomizes something about women that the painter found intriguing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @03:20AM
Talking of meat, I don't think Leonardo had a very large cock. I find that disappointing. Plain women and average size penises, meh deep freeze me until they invent the Internet where the laydiez have massive bazookas and the art looks like it was painted by Thomas Kinkade [nyt.com].
(Score: 2) by Kitsune008 on Wednesday June 24 2020, @04:01PM
No, you are not the only one.
Every time I have heard praise of her supposed beauty, my first thought has always been: "Really? There must of been a whole lot of fugly back then."
I just don't get it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:08AM
Have you seen it in person?
I've thought poorly of art which, seen firsthand, was very moving.
I've heard shit music too - shit music which, live, was profound.
Converting to a detail chopping mode (images online or in books, compressed recorded music) sometimes interferes with the details that make a piece work.