McManus and Thomas air some important issues in relation to the hypothesis of eye-centering in portraits, but many of them were already addressed in the original publication of Tyler (1998 Nature392 877). The statistical simulation offered by these authors does not have appropriate assumptions to match the properties of the observed distributions in historical portraiture. Further analysis of the two-dimensional form of the distribution strongly supports the hypothesis, as does an independent experiment of student's placements of drawn heads when blind to the hypothesis.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AtalayB., 2004Math and the Mona Lisa: The Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books).
2.
IgelA.HarveyL OJr, 1991“Spatial distortions in visual perception”Gestalt Theory13210–231.
3.
LivioM., 2000The Accelerating Universe: Infinite Expansion, the Cosmological Constant and the Beauty of the Cosmos (New York: Wiley).
4.
Reynolds Sir Joshua, 1769Discourses on Painting (reprinted 1987, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
5.
TylerC W, 1998a“Painters centre one eye in portraits”Nature392877.
6.
TylerC W, 1998b“Eye placement principles in portraits and figure studies of the past two millennia”Human Vision and Electronic Imaging III 431–437.
7.
WollastonW H, 1824“On the apparent direction of eye in a portrait”Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B114247–256.
