MONA LISA SMILE RIDDLE 'SOLVED'
MONA LISA SMILE RIDDLE 'SOLVED'
(ANSA) - London, October 29 - The secret of the Mona Lisa's vanishing smile is in the messages sent to the brain by the beholder's eyes, a Spanish neuroscientist claims.
''Sometimes one channel wins over the other, and you see the smile, sometimes others take over and you don't see the smile,'' Alicante-based neuroscientist and art lover Luis Martinez Otero says in the latest edition of British science journal New Scientist.
Otero asked volunteers to look at different-sized versions of the portrait from varying differences and in varying light.
Closer or better-lit viewing brought the smile to life while dimmer and distant conditions made it fade.
Using new computer software, Otero and his assistant Diego Alonso Pablos also gauged different observation positions.
Dead-centre vision appeared to produce a fuller and smugger smile while peripheral views made Mona Lisa seem sad, they said.
The reason, they concluded, is that different cells in the retina transmit different categories of information.
These channels, Otero and Pablos say, encode data in different ways, leading to the apparent 'shape-shifting' on the lips of the woman captured by Leonardo in 1503-06.
The Spanish study isn't the first to argue that viewing conditions determine how the smile appears.
In 2000 a Harvard neuroscientist said the smile was easier to see from the side while in 2005 another US team said random noise could interfere with its appearance. OTHER THEORIES.
Other theories are based on speculation about the woman recently identified as the wife of Florence merchant Francesco Del Giocondo.
She was pregnant, or had recently given birth, some say, or perhaps she had just lost a loved one.
Others have argued the painting is a self-portrait of the artist, or one of his favourite male lovers in disguise, citing the fact that Da Vinci kept the painting with him until his death at Amboise, France in 1519.
The most curious theories have been provided by medical experts-cum-art lovers.
One group of medical researchers has maintained that the sitter's mouth is so firmly shut because she was undergoing mercury treatment for syphilis which turned her teeth black.
An American dentist has claimed that the tight-lipped expression was typical of people who have lost their front teeth, while a Danish doctor was convinced she suffered from congenital palsy which affected the left side of her face.
A French surgeon has also put forth his view that she was semi-paralysed, perhaps as the result of a stroke.
Leading American feminist writer Camille Paglia simply concluded that the cool, appraising smile showed that ''what Mona Lisa is ultimately saying is that males are unnecessary''.
