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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @07:23PM (1 child)
Elite athletes often have reaction times faster than normal people. Have you tried the "drop a dollar bill and catch between two fingers" bar game? Here's one version, https://interestingengineering.com/impossible-catch-dollar-bill-fingers [interestingengineering.com] The narrator uses 0.2 seconds for reaction time and calculates that the bill drops 20 cm in that time (but the bill is more like 15 cm long)...so most people can't catch it.
My friend, an ex-Olympic cyclist, could catch the bill consistently when he was younger, even when it was choked up a bit, so his reaction time is about half of a normal person, or 0.1 seconds.
In another domain, Ayrton Senna (Formula 1 champion) was recorded by the data system in his car reacting to the start of a slide--at about 5Hz. Normal humans struggle to operate closed loop at 2Hz.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @03:23AM
It's almost like it's a skill that you can practice and get good at. Amazing.