(Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resources/Scala, Florence)
Why don’t we notice impossible lighting and unlikely reflections in realistic-looking paintings? The answer is all about speed
IT IS a joyous occasion – the newborn Virgin Mary gets her first bath, surrounded by attentive nursemaids. Her mother, exhausted from the birth, reclines on a golden dais in an alcove. All are bathed in beautiful light that floods in from all directions. But hang on a second. Where is all this light coming from, when there is only one arched opening and a small window to illuminate the alcove in the plaza? And why do the people in the foreground cast deeper shadows than those further back?
Although nothing seems amiss at first glance, the more you look at this painting by Fra Carnevale, the more incongruities you find. “You couldn’t recreate the Carnevale scene with all the spotlights in Hollywood,” says , a neuroscientist at Paris Descartes University in France and at the Vision Science Laboratory of Harvard University.
Yet we rarely notice these discrepancies because the brain’s intuitive understanding of light and reflection is so poor. Indeed, Cavanagh’s studies have found that when the brain analyses a shadow, it doesn’t notice discrepancies in the direction of light, the shape of the object or the distance between an object and its shadow (). Artists like Carnevale cashed in on this trait to create atmospheric scenes that couldn’t possibly exist.
Reflections in mirrors are equally challenging to the brain. When at the University of Liverpool, UK, asked…
