Neuroscientists believe that the woman who posed for Leonardo da Vinci was hiding something.
Scientists are haunted by Mona Lisa or La Gioconda - the famous portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. Frequent to him. Now doctors, psychologists, then physicists. Every month, some new research. The last neuroscientists who experimented with the portrait were the American Luca Marsili from the University of Cincinnati, the British Lucia Ricciardi from St. George's University in London and Matteo Bologna from Rome University of La Sapienza (Sapienza University in Rome). The Daily Mail newspaper reports: they, like numerous predecessors, were interested in the smile of a woman posing for a painter. Is that what she is? Sincere? Or cunning? What does it express? And is it a smile at all? Or some kind of grimace? It turned out that neither one nor the other. Something in between. Because the mouth is not symmetrical in the portrait. That is crooked. From this "discovery" neuroscientists have drawn further conclusions.
The asymmetry of Mona Lisa's smile was revealed using a mirror. The experimenters put it to the woman's lips, dividing them in half - so that the other half was reflected in the mirror. First, they reflected the part of the woman's smile on the left, then the one on the right side of the face. The resulting - whole - images were compared.
The tips of the lips, made up of the left parts - real and reflected, were lifted so that there was no doubt: this is a smile. "Right lips" curled down so that the smile disappeared.
Mona Lisa and her lips (below): c - right - sad - part of the face and its reflection, d - left - smiling - half.
Scientists checked their personal impressions on volunteers - almost everyone saw the same thing. Namely, they reported a happy smile in the left reflection, and a certain tense grimace in the right one.
The conclusion, published in Cortex magazine, is that a crooked smile in a portrait cannot be genuine. The "model" is either cunning, thinking about something of her own - a woman's, or is tired of smiling while posing.
I repeat: facial expressions on the left side of the portrait are not the same as on the right. What if this is what confuses observers? The look rushes from one side to the other from which and creates the illusion that Mona Lisa will smile or become sad.
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According to the third - conspiracy - version of neuroscientists, Leonardo da Vinci, being a great physiognomist, knew about the effect that asymmetrically drawn lips can produce - in the form of a half smile. Deliberately portrayed them that way. And he encrypted something with it.
The dual impression is aggravated not only by "different" lips, but also by facial expressions in general. According to the theory popular to this day, the author of which was the French neurologist of the last century Guillaume Duchenne, the face expresses the emotion of joy by joint muscle contraction - the cheeks rise, the eyes squint. Mona Lisa does not demonstrate anything like that even with her seemingly joyful - left - side.
ANOTHER OPINION
What if she's all so happy
German psychologists from Freiburg (Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, Freiburg, Germany) conducted their experiments two years ago. And based on their results, they concluded: Mona Lisa smiles happily.
The researchers also dealt exclusively with the lips - they slightly tweaked them. Created several options on which the tips were slightly lowered or slightly raised. The result is a set of 9 smiles. The real one among them - from the picture - was one. Four were “saddened” and four were “amused”. The smiles mixed and began to be presented to the volunteers to be appreciated. Result: 97 percent of the participants in the experiment recorded the smile from the portrait of Mona Lisa as funny. What scientists reported in the journal Nature in the article Mona Lisa is always happy - and only sometimes sad
- Mona Lisa was happy with everything, - then assured Jurgen Kornmeier, who led the research.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY