SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Funny) by Bot on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:15PM (1 child)
Use the Italian spelling, monna, accenting the N, unless you want the Italians in the room to snicker.
Monna = madonna = donna = domina = woman (domina because Latins knew who rules in the house)
Mona = cunt (same root, unsurprisingly).
Lisa = diminutive of Elisa but also, referring to cloth, "threadbare", "thin to the extreme because of heavy use"
So when talking about "mona lisa" the true Italian gentleman replies "no wonder she smiles"
As for the painting, I would not bother queuing up to see it, the photos render it better than the real life small painting behind thick glass.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday June 25 2020, @08:34PM
77 x 53 cm isn't a bad size for a painting. But if you can only see it from a distance behind armour-plated glass, it's too small. As my wife said after she saw it long ago.