Eye Placement Principles In Portraits And Figure Studies Over The Past Two Millennia Christopher W. Tyler ABSTRACT

The importance of the center of the canvas has long been appreciated in art, as has the way the eyes as revealing the personality of the subjects of portraits. Is there a consistent placement of the eyes relative to the canvas frame, based on the horizontal position of the eyes in portraits? Data from portraits over the past 2000 years quantify that one eye is centered with a standard deviation of less than + 5%. Classical texts on composition do not seem to mention the idea that the eyes as such should be positioned relative to the frame of the picture; the typical emphasis is on the placement of centers of mass in the frame or relative to the vanishing point in cases of central perspective. If such a compositional principle is not discussed in art analysis, it seems that its manifestation throughout the centuries and varieties of artistic styles (including the extreme styles of the 20th century) must be guided by unconscious perceptual processes.

INTRODUCTION

The importance of the center of the canvas has long been appreciated in art (1), as has the importance of the eyes as revealing the personality of the subjects of portraits. The question addressed in the study is whether there is a consistent placement of the eyes relative to the canvas frame, with specific reference to their horizontal position. One hypothesis is that the center of the face has a consistent positioning (in portraits where both eyes are visible). This center of symmetry of the face is often discussed in art analysis (1-5) and may be expected to be used as an explicit compositional primitive by artists trained according to such analysis. The second hypothesis is that one eye of the portrait dominates the compositional positioning in relation to the frame.

Fig. 1. Portraits of rhte Murray family over four centuries (from Bruce and Young, 1998) , illustrating the degree to which one eye tends to be placed on the center line, despite a variety of styles and head positionings over four centuries. The white line runs down the horizontal center and is broken where it reaches the level of the most-centered eye. Fig. 1 illustrates the degree to which an eye tends to be set near the center vertical despite the vraiety of styles over the centuries. A survey of classical texts on composition has reveal only a couple of mentions of the idea that the eyes as such should be positioned relative to the frame of the picture; the typical emphasis is on the placement of centers of mass in the frame or relative to the vanishing point in cases of central perspective (1-5, 12-18). If this compositional principle is not discussed in art analysis, it seems that its manifestation throughout the centuries and varieties of artistic styles (including the extreme styles of the 20th century) must be essentially unconscious. How general is the phenomenon of eye centering in portraits? In one sense, Western European art may be considered to belong to an integrated school of continuous interrelation between the artists, from master to pupil, over the centuries. Once art academies and museums were set up, artists could go and imbibe the styles of their forebears, providing an unconscious transference of effective design principles even if they were not discussed specifically or committed to print. In this context, it is exciting that an epoch of portraiture has recently been uncovered that is quite remote from the Western Renaissance tradition. These are the Fayyum funerary portraits of the expatriate Greeks in Egypt, in the first and second centuries AD. Arising from a vibrant intellectual community in Egypt that included many converts from the Roman repression of the Jews, these portraits have an astonishing freshness of technique and vivid sense of the subject depicted. They have been largely ignored until recentlybecause they were from an outpost of the Roman Empire and seemed provincial with respect to the centers of Greek culture, but did not qualify as Egyptian art from their country of origin because they were painted by Greeks.

Fig. 2. Four portraits from the Fayyum period of ancient Egypt, illustrating many of the same artistic properties as the classical portraits of later millennia, including the proximity of one eye to the center vertical. The Fayyum portraits were painted as a substitute for the carved death masks in the mummification practice that was adopted from the Egyptian culture by these indigenous Greeks. The portraits were painted rapidly in tempura (egg-white paint), but seem to have been done long before the death of the subject, since most of them show the subject in the prime of life. The artists were evidently able to employ a full range of the tools of realism so prized during the Renaissance, including foreshortening, shape-from-shading (known to artists as chiarascuro), reflective highlights, cast shadows, subtle color gradations, and so on. The portraits were wrapped in place with the elaborate burial shrouds, forming a defined frame against which the eye position can be judged. As can be seen in the four examples reproduced in Fig. 2, in many cases one eye is positioned quite close to the center of the aperture of the shroud, contrasting strikingly with the carved death masks of the Egyptians, which are always completely symmetric. Although not all Fayyum portraits are as decentered as these examples, it is interesting that the head is often shifted away from being centered in the frame, as though it were more important to bring one eye close to the center. Clearly, this remote community of portrait artists conform to many of the same principles as much of later Western art, which seems to have developed in complete ignorance of their forebears. Quantitative Analysis of Portraits To quantify the relation between eye position and the canvas frame, the horizontal positions of the eyes were measured in classical portraits by all 165 artists represented in a variety of published summary sources drawing from the past six centuries (4-11). The portraits were selected as the first by a given artist in each source (4-11) meeting the following criteria: that the portraits were drawn by hand (oil paintings, watercolors, drawings or engravings) to ensure that the artist had maximum control over the composition; that there was only one person in the portrait; that both eyes were visible; and that depiction of the body did not go below the waist (to ensure that the head rather than the figure was the principal element of the composition). For comparison, the positions of the centers of the mouths were also measured. The single-eye placement hypothesis was evaluated formally by defining the most-centered eye of a portrait as the one closest to the vertical center line. If eyes were positioned according to the center of symmetry of the two eyes in relation to the vertical axis, both eyes will be about the same distance from the axis and the choice of eye will make little difference to the result. Conversely, if the head is positioned randomly relative to the center vertical, choice of the closer eye as the one for analysis will narrow the distribution somewhat, but by no more than a factor of , the standard deviation of the minimum of two samples from a Gaussian distribution.

Fig. 3 a. Histogram of lateral location of the most-centered eye (filled triangles) in 165 portraits over the past 600 years. Eye position was defined as position of the center of the eye opening, regardless of pupil position. b. Distribution of horizontal mouth positions (filled circles) is much broader than for the eyes in a. c. Distribution of horizontal eye positions in the 23 profile portraits from the same sources (defined as portraits in which the head is turned so much that only one eye is visible). The distribution (open circles) is even broader than the distribution of features in more frontal portraits. The histogram of Fig. 3a vividly illustrates how one eye is placed in a narrow distribution peaking at the lateral center in portraits over the past 6 centuries (s.d. = + 4.2%). Other features of the face do not seem to be accurately centered. The horizontal position of the mouth, for example, is spread across the frame (Fig 3b), with a distribution about two-and-a-half times wider than that of the best-centered eye (s.d. = + 10.5%, significantly wider than 1.414 x 4.2%, p < 0.01). On the other hand, one type of portrait that is identified as not adhering strongly to the same principles is the side view of the head. In the smaller sample of side views from the same sources (4-11), the eye positions are scattered widely throughout the frame (s.d. = 18%, significantly wider than 1.414 x 4.2%, p < 0.01, even for this small sample). Evidently, passing to the pose of the side view changes the rule of composition so that eye-centering is no longer paramount. Perhaps, now that the subject's attention is perceived as being directed away from the viewer, the relevant principle becomes the centering of the head in the frame because the head dominates the composition.

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