Kevin's Thoughts On Leonardo Da Vinci And Sfumato

Dan Brown's tremendous bestseller “The Da Vinci Code” has reintroduced and regenerated people’s vast interests in art history, especially toward Leonardo Da Vinci and his masterpieces. Predictably, many people sunk their teeth back into the century old Mona Lisa identity controversy and the hidden knowledge behind it. However, true art historians study Da Vinci seeking much more than fictionalized myths concerning his art collections. His perfection of employing visual effects － an imaginative technique creating enigma and ambiguity, blurred backgrounds and edges, and subtle hidden illusions － represents his true qualities that have produced people’s continuing fascination towards him. Among these qualities, the Sfumato technique generated many discussions. One article explains the inspiration behind the technique and how it stimulates viewers’ active engagement. The other article demonstrates the magical visual effect that the technique can create and the visual effects it arouses.

In “‘Blurred’ horizon in Leonardo’s paintings,” Luba Freedman explores the motivation behind Da Vinci’s unconventional artistic device － depicting the horizons with vagueness. He concludes that the hope to stimulating the spectator's participation largely inspired Da Vinci’s adoption of such technique. During Da Vinci’s career, the traditional painting construction involved portraying a distinct horizon line in the background that's discernible to the spectators. However, Da Vinci departed from the tradition. Insead of having a defined line, he created an imperceptible transition between light, shade, and colors, and m ade everything without borders. As a result, the horizons in his painting are often left blurring and fading. Da Vinci transferred the blurring horizon to the vague depiction of the whole background.

For example, in “the Annunciation” (on the left), the background has various planes: the garden, the harbor and the distant mountains. The horizon line is barely traceable. In “The Virgin and Saint Anne” (on the right), the distant mountains have blurred outlines. The background does not have a continuous

horizon line. The same can be seen in “Mona Lisa.” The background consists of vague mountains with two roads that gradually fade away in to the distance. The boundary extends to indefinite depth and “ceases to be traceable.” The contrast between the ambiguous background and focused subjects in the foreground creates a sense of mystery and forces the viewers to perceive actively as their gazes have to move back and forth between the front and the distant view in an attempt to interpret the backgrounds. Thus it triggers the spectators’ imaginations and encourages just the type of active perception that Da Vinci wished.

This technique is Sfumato, and it appears to have more magical effects than simply creating imagination. Remember the eye trick game on iphone? You stare at a black and white image of Jesus for 30 seconds and then close you eyes and look at something bright, the image of Jesus would emerge. That’s because the image is constructed in a certain way so that it stimulates a particular interaction between the eye and the brain which creates the visual effect. The article, “The Turbulent Structure of Sfumato within Mona Lisa,” describes a sensational visual phenomenon in the painting “Mona Lisa” in which the figure seems alive and the face of Mona Lisa evolves into an infinite form of other faces depending how it is looked at. The author, Diogo Queiros-Conde, claims that Sfumato - a technique that involves vague, blurring depiction of transition - gives the painting a “turbulent structure.” Just like people can experience turbulence on an unpredictable flight, moving and constantly changing, the viewers can perceive an unstable, moving figure. Like, fluid, it is a perfect unity, yet it displays the continuous movement. The author introduces a visual experiment that illustrates the visual effect in “Mona Lisa.” His instructions are the following. Set it in moderate lighting. Then blink your eyes, choosing alternately one eye and closing the other. Increase the frequency and stop suddenly. People can observe that Mona Lisa’s smile and gaze change: the smile can disappear or be strangely amplified. The face takes on very different expressions: “The painting behaves like a sand dune, constantly reorganizing itself after each blink.” Thus one should see the face of Mona Lisa taking on infinite forms, leading to infinite faces. This is not a universal visual effect that one can observe in any painting. After applying the method on an ordinary portrait chosen for comparison, the author claims mere blinking would barely change anything in our perception of the portrait. But with Mona Lisa, a simple blink can modify our vision.

Both articles structure their argument and evidence similarly. They initiate their arguments with a general conclusion and support the arguments with examples. Professionally, they tied in their convincing techniques. But to me, Luba’s observations seem more realistic and easier to detect. People can clearly perceive the vagueness in the examples and immediately have their own interpretations, whereas they might not be able to successfully observe the movement of Mona Lisa’s face because of the light limitation, quality of the painting, etc. When I look at “Mona Lisa,” I always get lost in the blurred, unmeasurable space, but I can hardly perceive a living, breathing person that has changing facial expressions. Maybe I'm just not artistic enough and should stick to my forte of calculus.