'Mona Lisa Effect' Is Real But Doesn't Apply To Leonardo's Painting

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There have long been anecdotal reports that the eyes of the Mona Lisa -- Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting -- sometimes seem to follow viewers as they move around the artwork. The phenomenon is even called the 'Mona Lisa effect' because of it. But a new study published in the journal i-Perception found that she's really 'looking' to the right-hand side of her audience. 'There is no doubt about the existence of the Mona Lisa effect,' the authors wrote. 'It just does not occur with the Mona Lisa herself.'

This was a small study, with just 24 subjects. All were asked to look at a high-resolution recreation of the Mona Lisa on a computer monitor, with a folding ruler placed between them and the screen to track viewing distance. Subjects would signal where they perceived Mona Lisa's gaze met the ruler. The researchers sampled 15 sections of the famous portrait, ranging from the Mona Lisa's full head to just her eyes and nose, and they showed subjects each image three times in random order. They also changed the ruler's distance from the monitor halfway through the sessions. Based on the more than 2,000 individual assessments, they found no evidence of the Mona Lisa effect with Leonardo's masterpiece. 'We demonstrated that Mona Lisa gazes to her left-hand side [the viewer's right] from about 35.5 cm inside pictorial space, and 14.4 degrees to the viewer's right-hand side in real space,' the authors wrote. 'Thus, Mona Lisa does not fulfill the premise of the Mona Lisa effect. She does not gaze at the viewer.'

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