We might appreciate living in an period that doesn’t require us to travel internationally to know what a particular murals appears to be like like. On the identical time, we might instinctively beneathstand that regarding a murals in its original type feels different than regarding even probably the most religionful reproduction. That features the ten-billion-pixel scan, previously featured right here on Open Culture, of Johannes Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Earring — which happens to be the exact same painting utilized in a current scientific research that investigates actually why it feels a lot extra interesting to take a look at artwork in a museum fairly than on a display or a web page.
The research was commissioned by the Mauritshuis, which owns Vermeer’s most well-known painting. “Researchers used electroencephalograms (EEGs) to disclose that actual artworkworks, including Woman with a Pearl Earring, elicit a powerful positive response a lot higher than the response to reproductions,” says the museum’s press launch.
“The key behind the attraction of the ‘Woman’ can also be primarily based on a novel neurological phenomenon. Not like other paintings, she manages to ‘captivate’ the viewer, in a ‘sustained attentional loop.’ ” This course of most clearly stimulates part of the mind known as the precuneus, which is “concerned in a single’s sense of self, self-reflection and episodic memories.”
Woman with a Pearl Earring wasn’t the one painting used within the research, but it surely professionalduced by far the goodest measurready difference within the viewers’ neurological reaction. The others, which included Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait (1669) and Van Honthorst’s Violin Player, lack the distinctively prominent human features that encourage additional looking: “As with most faces, visitors look first on the Woman’s eyes and mouth, however then their attention shifts to the pearl, which then guides the main target again to the eyes and mouth, then to the pearl, and so forth.” Museumgoers put oning electroencephalogram-reading headunits will not be fairly what Walter Benjamin had in thoughts when he put his thoughts to defining the “aura” of an original artworkwork — however they’ve, these 90 or so years later, lent some scientific support to the concept.
Related content:
A Guided Tour Via All of Vermeer’s Well-known Paintings, Narrated by Stephen Fry
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee-book.