When does Mona Lisa smile?
Again someone seems to solved the secret behind Mona Lisa’s smile: a psychologist from Austria claims that the mysterious woman known as Mona Lisa only appears to be smiling if we are looking straight into her eyes.
Florian Hutzler from Salzburg assumes that Leonardo da Vinci used a unique technique to paint the picture: if we are looking at Mona Lisa’s lips instead of her eyes, than our brain will sense a neutral face expression.
This assumption was drawn by American psychologist, Margarest S. Livingstone in the past and now Hutzler confirmed her assumption with practical investigations.
The Austrian psychologist analysed the Mona Lisa-effect through a computer program. People who were participated in this research have checked out 100 young women portraits. Hutzler followed their eye-movement with a special camera. When the participants have looked straight into eyes of women displayed on the portraits, they saw them smiling. However, when people looked at the women lips on the portraits, the researches changed the portraits smiling expressions to neutral but the participants didn’t find this perceive this and they even mentioned about secret smiles on the portraits.
Florian Hutzler believes this research helped to prove that the secret of Mona Lisa’s smile resides in people eyes or rather in brains.
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