by Jon Lackman | 11 November 2009 | Renaissance
From The Telegraph:
One of the charms of the world’s most famous painting is that she appears radiant one moment and then serious and sardonic the next. Now scientists claim to have come up with an answer to her changing moods – our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain. They believe Mona Lisa’s smile depends on what cells in the retina pick up the image and what channel the image is transmitted through in the brain … The research was originally presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago. This isn’t the first time scientists have deconstructed Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. In 2000, Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School with a side interest in art history, showed that Mona Lisa’s smile is more apparent in peripheral vision.
