by Rik Smits
Two classic versions of the Madonna and Child. On the left Leonardo’s Madonna Litta, 1490, on the right Albrecht Dürer’s Madonna of the Pear , 1512. The light falls from the left, shining directly on Mary’s face and softening its contours. As usual, the babies are fairly hideous.
In the standard composition, therefore, the subject of the portrait looks towards the left of the picture, showing the painter and viewer his or her left cheek. This is one of the reasons why Madonnas are twice as likely to hold a child on their right arm than we would expect from Salk’s data. A Madonna and child is a composition that can easily be painted in a studio. After all, the model is usually an anonymous girl, not a demanding client who must be catered to in her own home. The studio would be laid out for maximum efficiency, which for a right-handed artist meant the light would fall from his left. To catch the full light without any additional artifice, the model would therefore have to turn her head to the left as we look at her, in other words to her right, but at the same time a Madonna needs to look down lovingly at her child, which must therefore sit at her right breast. Were it on her left side, she would be looking away from the infant, as if she’d rather be without it, which of course would not do at all.
The angle of the light, however important, is only one factor in determining the appearance of a portrait, which is why by and large there are just as many portraits in which the subject shows the right cheek as there are in which the left cheek is turned to the viewer, although according to some the left cheek is slightly overrepresented. If we treat portraits of men and women separately, however, the proportions change dramatically. In the Rijksmuseum and Mauritshuis collections, almost two out of every three men show their right cheek while for women precisely the reverse applies. Other collections produce similar figures. Clearly this is something we need to explore further.
Quite a few explanations have been put forward for the suspected slight preponderance across the board of left-cheeked portraits. The simplest is that it’s more natural and easier for a right-handed person to draw a profile facing towards the left of the picture. This makes sense if we consider spontaneous sketches made without a model, or mindless doodling during boring meetings, but it would say little for the craftsmanship of a professional painter if he allowed himself to be guided by such considerations. Other theories refer to the social relationship between the artist and the model, or even to the way our brains recognize faces. None of them are satisfactory, for two reasons.
First they assume that all things being equal there is an absolute preference. In other words if a model of a given status prefers to be shown from a particular direction, then the same must apply to all models of the same status. Similarly, if it has to do with the way the brain recognizes faces, then the same preference would be at work in all cases. But coins show that this is not so. They always feature kings, emperors, gods or other superior folk and we look at them every day with the same brains, yet there is no way of guessing which profile will be used. The same Uhrbrock who studied the baby-carrying arm discovered that on American coins and commemorative medals the person portrayed looks to the left in two out of every three cases, but in the large collection of European coins at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, which covers 25 centuries, the proportions are almost exactly the reverse. Moreover, none of the theories explain why the difference in orientation between portraits of men and of women is so marked.
As to the latter question, Las Meninas may once again provide an answer, since not we but the royal couple, Philip iv and Mariana of Austria, are the models for the portrait that Velázquez is shown painting. They can be seen in the mirror in the middle of the back wall of the room.* Their mirror image shows that Mariana must be standing to the left of her husband, and this cannot be coincidental. For a double portrait, certainly until the eighteenth century, this was the standard arrangement. Since man and wife invariably stand or sit turned towards each other, such portraits almost always show the left cheek of the woman and the right cheek of the man.
Albrecht Dürer, double portrait on separate panels of Hans and Felicitas Tucher, 1499. The light falls from the front left, emphasizing the angular face of the self-assured Hans and the soft, round features of his rather sceptical-looking wife.
We find plenty of examples of the same type of composition in double portraits on two separate canvases. There are almost no couples in portraits in the Rijksmuseum with the man standing to the left of his wife, and none at all among those painted prior to 1700. It is a traditional arrangement that shows we are dealing with a respectable married couple, and one that still applies in the rules for formal church weddings; once the ceremony is over, the bride leaves the church on the left side of her new husband. This tradition has apparently had a profound influence not only on the double portrait but, via the double portrait on separate canvases, on the composition of portraits of lone individuals as well.
The strong tradition of portraying women with their left cheeks to the fore and men the other way around therefore seems to be derived from rituals and etiquette, but there is probably more to it than that. The phenomenon is reinforced by the influence of the angle of the light on the composition. Even in right-cheeked portraits the light generally falls from the left, so the model is looking away from the light to a greater or lesser degree. This does not necessarily mean that the face is obscured, but it does tend to emphasize the edges of the profile, strengthening the curve of the nose and the lines of the chin and forehead. This kind of lighting tends to stress sternness, willpower and other characteristics traditionally attributed to the male. The softness, roundness and elegance that are thought of as typically feminine are not aided by such angular lighting; they are more apparent when the light bathes the whole face equally, in other words when the face is turned towards the left of the picture, where the light is coming from.
So it came about that a great many posing Madonnas, in order to display their femininity and their soft features, were forced to treat their children with unpleasant severity.
*Some experts are of the opinion that the royal couple are not the subject of Velázquez’s attention, since no double portrait of them is known and because the canvas shown in the picture is too large for a portrait. But in that case what are they doing at the spot where the model should be? Furthermore, what Velázquez professes to show, Las Meninas, cannot possibly have been painted from life. The fact that he was not in reality working on a double portrait therefore tells us nothing.
20
Little Johnny Cries to the Left,
Little Johnny Smiles to the Left
Human faces are remarkable things. Everyone knows that the left and right halves may differ considerably. Like the rest of our bodies, faces are only broadly symmetrical, a fact that is not without consequences. Symmetrical faces are seen as a hallmark of beauty. There’s an assumption that we can explain this in evolutionary terms. Regular features are said to indicate good health and a flawless package of genes, and people with symmetrical faces are therefore valuable partners in the struggle to reproduce.
Less well known is the fact that the two halves of the face have different roles, both in the recognition of someone’s identity and in the interpretation of his or her emotional state.
Generally speaking people can effortlessly express at least six different emotions on their faces: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust and anger. Of course we can convey more than that with our facial expressions, but these six occur in all cultures and are equally easy to produce and to recognize in every population group. Oddly enough it’s the left side of the face that does most to determine which emotions others see in it. This was made clear many years ago when research subjects were shown two pictures of a face, each the mirror image of the other and in all other respects identical, in which one side was cheerful while the other looked glum. Around eight out of ten people turned out to base their assessment of the depicted character’s mood mainly on the left side. If the left half of the figur
e’s face looked unhappy, people thought he was unhappy, if only the right half looked sad, he was seen as rather more cheerful.
When it comes to the straightforward recognition of a person based on his or her face, the right side weighs more heavily. Tests show that people feel an image of the right half of a face filled in with a mirror image of that same half bears a greater resemblance to the person depicted than a composite photo made of two images of the left half. In some sense we resemble the right side of our faces more than we resemble the left.
Eight out of ten people feel that the face on the left looks more sorrowful than the face on the right. In fact they are identical, except that one is the mirror image of the other.
This phenomenon probably has to do with the difference between the two halves of our brains, which each have their own specialist functions. The left half of the brain is good at everything that relies upon calculation: counting, arithmetic, logical reasoning and much that has to do with language. Among the things the right cerebral hemisphere concentrates on are the interpretation, recognition and recollection of images. Of course there are a great many things that the two halves of the brain do together, if only because many complex tasks make use of simple functions, some of them located in one half of the brain and some in the other. That cooperation between the two hemispheres is made possible by connections between them at various levels, known as commissures, which work like bundles of telephone lines in a large office complex. The biggest by far is the corpus callosum, a broad band of tissue that is unique in making direct contact with both halves of the cerebrum.
In the case of our eyes, which in a sense are bulges in the brain that stick out through the skull, information coming from the left half of each retina is initially processed by the left half of the brain, and vice versa. So if we look directly at a face, its left half, which is on the right side of our visual field, is registered on the left half of the retina and that half is therefore initially processed by the left cerebral hemisphere. The right side of the face, to the left as we look at it, is registered on the right half of the retina, which sends signals to the right half of the brain.
Four famous people and their half-faces. Clockwise from the top left the American president John F. Kennedy, Russian ruler Vladimir Putin, supermodel Doutzen Kroes and baby Cleo. In each case the middle picture shows their real face, with below it a doubled left half on the right and a doubled right half on the left. Even Kroes’s extremely symmetrical face looks more like its right half.
It therefore seems logical that we base our recognition of faces on their right side, since that information goes straight to the right half of the brain where our capacity to recognize faces is located. Information about the other side can reach that part of the brain only via a detour through the corpus callosum. This works fine too; we can instantly recognize a face even if its owner covers the right half, although it does take us a tiny bit more effort. Why is it then that in recognizing emotions on faces, a fairly subtle piece of interpretation based on visual information alone, we mainly take account of the left side of the face?
One explanation that has been advanced is that there is simply more to be seen on the left side of a face, since it’s controlled by the right side of the brain, the side that is more emotionally orientated. But even if this is correct it does not solve the problem. It’s certainly not the case that emotions are exclusively the prerogative of the right side of the brain and even if they were, the advantage of the greater expressiveness of the left side of the face would be cancelled out by the emotional hamfistedness of the left half of the brain, which we use to observe that part of a face. The following explanation may therefore be more convincing, although it too is based on an unproven assumption.
Cross-section of the brain in between the two cerebral hemispheres. We are looking at the right side, with the right half of the bisected corpus callosum at the centre. The white brain stem below it continues downwards as the spinal column.
Although emotions are not entirely the preserve of the right cerebral hemisphere, it does seem true to say that the right brain is more emotionally oriented than the left. It could therefore be the case that the left half of a face, controlled as it is by the right side of the brain, is more expressive of emotions. If so, then the right side must be less changeable. This is precisely what makes it a better guide to simple recognition: in all circumstances it looks more like itself than the left side, which has a greater tendency to change according to the mood of its owner. As an extra bonus, when we look at a person the relatively unchanging half of his or her face is connected by the shortest possible route to the portrait gallery in the brain that enables us immediately to recognize family, friends and acquaintances, which is also located in the right brain.
The left brain is better suited to the recognition of the various expressions of emotion on a face. The recognition capacity of the right brain concentrates on making a perfect match between what we see and an image stored in the memory. Fleeting variations only make that task more difficult, whereas subtle changes suit the left brain rather well. Once our right brain has determined whose face we are looking at, our left brain can compare that image with what it sees on the left side of that same face. It then needs to make a complicated subtraction sum: what the left brain sees minus the right-brain-determined standard face gives the emotion that is being expressed. This information can be elaborated further, enabling us to work out exactly what emotion we are witnessing. Although this seems to involve a lot of traffic between the two halves of the brain, each half does exactly what it’s best at: the right brain is responsible for the recognition of a face and the interpretation of emotions at a high level, while the left brain makes calculations at which the right brain is less adept. In this way optimal use is made of the information we perceive with our eyes.
When we look directly at someone, the light from the right half of their face arrives on the right side of our retina. We therefore use the right half of the brain to ‘see’ the right half of a face.
21
The Circle Dance of the Alphabet
In April 1949 a remarkable photograph cropped up in various places around the world, showing a group of Yemeni Jews in a reception camp near the seaport of Aden. They are on their way to Israel and they’re all crowding around a Torah. One has the book in front of him in such a way that he can read it in the normal Hebrew manner from right to left, in lines that run from top to bottom. A second is sitting off to the left of the Torah and is therefore forced to read columns of text that run from top to bottom and from left to right. In the foreground another man is reading the text upside down and the rest too, from various angles, are doing their best to look at the pages.
It’s difficult for people in the rich world to imagine, but clearly these gentlemen are at ease with their unconventional reading positions. A scarcity of books, such that one copy had to be shared between three or four schoolchildren, had caused them to learn to read from various angles. Why not, in fact? There’s no law of nature that says, for example, that our letter A must stand with two feet on the ground; in fact, there was once a time when it didn’t. Originally, in the Phoenician alphabet, it was upside down, forming a pictogram of an ox’s head with horns. Later it came to lie on its side and only when the Greeks adopted it did the two ‘horns’ come to rest on the ground.
We may wonder how the men in the photograph wrote, assuming they had learned to do so. Did they orientate themselves in the same way as for reading, or did they write in the standard Hebrew manner, in horizontal lines from right to left? Did this affect how well they could write? The profound effect that the direction of our writing has on our observation of reality has led many people to conclude that, far from being a matter of chance, it’s determined by nature, a form of behaviour that somehow flows from our genetic inheritance, probably connected in some way to the predominance of right-handedness. It’s generally assumed that right-handed people naturally prefer to write from
left to right, left-handers in the other direction.
Different perspectives on a copy of the Torah.
This reasoning, to which many adhere, teachers in particular, suggests that ours is a fundamentally right-handed script. Arguments have been put forward in support of this claim. It is said to be more natural to use a right hand to write from left to right because it will then move away from the body. This conviction is in turn based on the assumption that movements away from the body are more natural than movements towards the body, although it’s far from clear why this should be the case. A second argument often advanced is that right-handers who write from left to right pull the pen across the paper, whereas if they write from right to left they are required to push it, which inevitably leads to smudges, and to bent and split nibs.
Anyone who replies that people elsewhere in the world are as predominantly right-handed as we are but for centuries have written from right to left to the full satisfaction of all concerned are told this is merely an illusion. The example given is almost always that of Hebrew. In that language, although the letters are written one after the other from right to left, each letter is formed from left to right. This is also the reason, people go on to say, why Hebrew is still written in block letters and does not have a flowing, joined-up form. Sometimes Chinese is brought to bear as well, a language traditionally written from top to bottom. The Chinese too, after all, form each character from left to right. The rules for forming letters and characters in these languages are said to indicate that basic biology will always show through, even in the case of right-to-left handwriting: people are naturally inclined to work from left to right.