Why mona lisa smiled

To really understand the true importance of the Mona Lisa , you have to go back to the old question: why is she smiling?

But the only way this works is by contemplating it not as a question, but as an answer. Before, during and long after the Renaissance, artists did not paint their subjects smiling. What this little gesture did was huge: it brought art to life. In the centuries leading up to the Renaissance, paintings were generally created as idealised images, often religious, to be contemplated and revered.

The Mona Lisa was a real woman who with a smile initiated a dialogue with the viewer that had not existed before; it changed the very nature of the relationship between art and audience. Not as exciting as a code in her clothing , but more useful: the trick of using a question as a clue and a key can be surprisingly useful.

Take one of the queries that has vexed humanity for centuries. What is the meaning of life? Inspiring films, self-help books and clever cartoons have all taken a crack at it, to no avail.

So if we consider the question as an endless, fruitless quest, we might reasonably assume that meaning is something we care an awful lot about. With this knowledge, Leonardo was able to create an uncatchable smile, one that is elusive if we are too intent on seeing it. If you stare directly at the mouth, your retina catches these tiny details and delineations, making her appear not to be smiling.

But if you move your gaze slightly away from the mouth, to look at her eyes or cheeks or some other part of the painting, you will catch sight of her mouth only peripherally.

It will be a bit blurrier. The tiny delineations at the corners of the mouth become indistinct, but you still will see the shadows there. These shadows and the soft sfumato at the edge of her mouth make her lips seem to turn upward into a subtle smile.

The result is a smile that flickers brighter the less you search for it. Scientists recently found a technical way to describe all of this. His expertise was in depicting the outer manifestation of inner emotions.

But here in the Mona Lisa he shows something more important: that we can never fully know true emotion from outer manifestations. Excerpted from Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. Livingstone's research is based on differences in spatial frequency perception within the eye. Spatial frequency is basically a measure of how detailed an image is.

A good example of spatial frequency is right on your computer. Images on a computer screen are made up of pixels tiny dots of colored light. Pictures with higher spatial frequency in other words, more pixels crammed into every square inch are sharper and more detailed than pictures with lower spatial frequency.

The tricky concept here is that different parts of your eye are actually "tuned in" to different spatial frequencies. Anything you look at has both high and low spatial frequency patterns, layered on top of each other—and what you see depends on how you look at it. To get a sense of this, pick an object in the room, like a picture. Look at it out of the corner of your eye.

It's kind of blurry, right? Now look straight at it. It snaps into focus. That's because you can see high spatial frequencies fine details with your central vision, but not low spatial frequencies broad, blurry patterns.

The opposite is true of your peripheral vision the stuff outside the center of your gaze. The secret behind the Mona Lisa is that the "happy" part of her smile is actually buried in a low spatial frequency pattern. The study appears in the journal Scientific Reports. When the viewer focuses on the mouth, however, it looks downturned. Smith at Discover. However, there is no evidence that da Vinci developed the enigmatic smile on purpose.