The Mona Lisa is Happy

In Cracking the Mona Lisa Smile, Elizabeth Millard demonstrates how technology is currently playing a role in the analysis of artwork. Personally, I think technology should not be used when analyzing art work, especially when so little is know about the work. The role of technology in artwork should be an informative role, which it is for the most part.

Millard references an experiment conducted by Sebe and Huang, who developed emotion-recognition software and applied it to the Mona Lisa. Using the software, the two University of Amsterdam and University of Illinois researchers quantified the Mona Lisa’s facial emotion. The use of “algorithms that quantify facial expressions” and “face tracking software that determines several major emotions in expression” allowed the researchers to quantify the painting. The researchers obtained their experimental data by determining the displacements in the Mona Lisa when compared to a “neutral, Caucasian female face”. The experiment determined that the Mona Lisa is 82.67 percent happy, 9.17 percent disgust, 5.81 percent fearful and 2.19 percent angry.

The two researchers admitted that the experiment was conducted for their own amusement and claim that they will not be examining any further works of art. Their main purpose was to highlight the “value and potential of emotion-recognition software.” While there is no doubt validity in their experiment, it should not be used as a means of analysis. If anyone were to use the results of this experiment to make an analysis of the Mona Lisa, they would be completely erroneous. The software may very well be dead on in the Mona Lisa being 82.67 percent happy; however, the Mona Lisa is a painting, not a real person. That means that, even though the facial expression is one of happiness, Da Vinici may not have intended it that way. The identity of the Mona Lisa is not known for sure. Some believe that she was “Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine cloth merchant”, while there are those that believe that she was not even based on a real person, but rather a composite of models. Dr. Lillian Schwartz, from Bell Labs even concluded that the Mona Lisa is a self-portrait of Da Vinci through a technological comparison of the Mona Lisa to a known self-portrait by Da Vinci. When she used a computer to compare the two images “the features of the face (aligned) perfectly.” (Mona Lisa). Many art historians do not agree with Schwartz’s experiment. They claim that Da Vinci, as a great artist, would have spent a great deal of his time practicing drawing the human face. The historians claim that Da Vinci likely used his own face to practice drawing; therefore, there are many similarities between the Mona Lisa’s face and Da Vinci’s own face (Mona Lisa). Given that we know so little about the identity of the Mona Lisa, the data from Sebe and Huang’s experiment should not be used to make inferences about the painting. Technology will never be able to confirm what Da Vinci was actually thinking and feeling when he painted the Mona Lisa.

Technology can, however, serve more useful roles in art. According to Millard, technology is playing a major role in the discussion of art. Today, technology can unite artists and their audiences via the internet. The article notes the growing use of blogs to discuss a particular work of art. The article also notes that technology is now used for art databases. These databases store prices for artwork and are a great idea because the freedom of information on the internet prevents art galleries from taking advantage of potential customers. Perhaps the most useful application of technology is the use of it to verify the authenticity of artwork.

Millard, Elizabeth. " Cracking the Mona Lisa Smile." NewsFactor Network. 03 February

2006. 08 Apr 2007. http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=41276&page=1

"Mona Lisa." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 10 Apr 2007

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_lisa

.

Enlightening Vermeer's Light

Being a film buff who particularly loves costume pieces, naturally I was drawn to looking at Vermeer paintings for at least one of these assignments. Reading through the article “The Strangeness of Vermeer” by Svetlana Alpers in Art in America (an article written in 1996) I was stricken with just how many of the technical aspects of Vermeer’s work that Tracy Chevalier wove into her novel Girl With a Pearl Earring. What is truly interesting about the article is that it was written in reflection after going to an exposition of over two-thirds of Vermeer’s paintings. The article is not so much an examination of his techniques or the interpretations of specific paintings, but more the appreciation of all of his works put together and how, as a whole, the body of work can be interpreted.

There main argument of the article involves both Vermeer’s portrayal of women (as well as the few men in his paintings) and the way that the paintings are much more a small window into the ideal world than a reflection of it. Alpers claims that the portrayal of Vermeer’s women is not so much to represent them as women but that they become this overarching representation of humanity itself. The work that the article is most concerned with as a singular piece is Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid. Personally, my favorite aspect of Vermeer’s paintings (and from what I can tell, most critical acclaim) is his realistic and innovative use of lighting. Alper’s particular fascination seems to be with the lighting of the Lady’s bodice, as on one shoulder it’s a deep grayish tone and on the shoulder closer to the light source it has become entirely bleached white. The page of an art criticism teacher explains to me numerous pieces of symbolism in the painting that I never even picked up on, such as the large painting in the background being a famous rendition of Moses “indicating that somebody must be rescued and cherished” and that on the window there is the sign of Temperance.

The thing that really catches my attention when I look at the painting is that the maid in the background seems to be presiding over the action, as well as being idle. The Lady may be in the foreground, yet she is occupied and her face is hidden. The painting projects that while the maid may not have all the liberty and wealth in the world, she elevates herself above petty things in the letter (there is even a letter crumpled up on the floor suggesting that the Lady was not satisfied with a previous draft). The maid also has the freedom to dream, suggested by the fact that she stares wistfully out of the window, and though she wears a poor person’s dress, her body remains untouched by any table, finery, or task. I also like the way that both women look in completely opposite directions, leading one to think that perhaps two worlds are portrayed here even in this tiny corner of the room.

Granted, I may have slightly romantic notions as to Vermeer’s works because of the novel Girl With a Pearl Earring, yet even in the novel as well as the movie the “strangeness” (as Alpers calls it) of Vermeer’s work comes through. They portray his detachedness of his work that Alpers put best: “in Vermeer's practice the painter crafting an image on the canvas is as humanly detached as if he himself were light making an image on a camera obscura screen.”