Who is the best Gioconda of them all? On the relativity of artistic quality caused by prior visual elaboration V Hesslinger, C-C Carbon |
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Department of General Psychology and Methods, University of Bamberg, Germany
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| For centuries, the Louvre version of the Mona Lisa (“La Gioconda”) has been attracting the interest of millions. Meanwhile covered by severely yellowed varnish, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece has actually lost its original brilliance of color and the visibility of several pictorial details. Still, most visitors are strongly affected by this specific outward appearance while they reject the nearly identical but much fresher looking sister painting owned by the Prado/ Madrid that shows the Mona Lisa in brilliant color and detail. To test whether this preference can be explained by a recent theory on aesthetic adaptation [Carbon, 2011, i-Perception, 2, 708-719], we asked 32 participants to assess the artistic quality of morphs between the Louvre and the Prado version within an elaboration-test-comparison-retest paradigm [see ‘Repeated Evaluation Technique’, see Carbon and Leder, 2005, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 587-601]. Whereas they strongly favored morphs having a texture more similar to the well-known Louvre version before comparing Louvre and Prado version (T1), they rejected these morphs afterwards (T2) when they had elaborated the Prado version, but not the Louvre version during the initial elaboration phase. The experiment demonstrates the flexibility of the perception of artistic quality on basis of prior visual elaboration. |
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