What Are YOU Looking At? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Mona Lisa

Lisa Gherardini, the woman in the portrait, became La Gioconda when she married Francesco del Giocondo. Harvard neurologist Margaret Livingstone has claimed that the flickering quality of her smile in the portrait stems from how attracted the viewer is to her eyes.

As the viewer focuses on her eyes, her mouth shifts to their peripheral vision, and the peripheral vision is less focused on detail and more likely to blur the distinction between her mouth and her cheekbones.

Answer: American Gothic

That woman was Nan Wood, the sister of artist Grant Wood, and her own tilted gaze itself arouses interest. Is she merely being modest, or disapproving somehow of the judgmental viewer? What exactly is the relationship between her and the man beside her (Grant Wood described her at various points as the man's wife and as his daughter)?

Answer: Venus

In a picture like "The Birth of Venus," featuring no fewer than four figures, how do you make sure that the viewer focuses on the right one? One way is to have everyone else in the painting looking at the important figure! Our eyes follow their eyes to watch the Goddess in the center of the painting as she comes ashore.

Answer: Andrew Wyeth

Olson was 55 years old when Wyeth painted "Christina's World", and had been unable to walk for nearly 20 years due to a degenerative muscular disorder. Wyeth wrote about the painting, "The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless."

As in "The Birth of Venus", my first instinct when I look at this painting is to follow Christina's eyes, and when I do I am always struck by how far away the farmhouse is and how much further Christina still has to go.

Answer: Olympia

"Olympia" was done in a parody of Renaissance works like Titian's "Venus of Urbino" and Giorgione's "Sleeping Venus", both of which feature a revered mythological figure gazing demurely downwards. Manet not only gave her a more challenging gaze, but painted details like a bracelet and a flower in her hair to suggest that this "Venus" may have been a courtesan (prostitute). Viewers of art at the time (1863) weren't supposed to have to look at such women, and they certainly weren't supposed to have such a woman look right back at them!

Answer: The Oath of the Horatii

While the young men of the Horatii family look confidently to their father as they swear an oath to fight the Curiatii, the real tragedy is hinted at on the other side of the painting. There the sisters and wives of the Horatii cannot bear to look on as their brothers and husbands swear an oath that could lead to their death.

In the Roman legend on which David based his painting, the tragedy goes still deeper: One Horatii wife is a member of the Curiatii family, while another weeping sister is herself betrothed to a Curiatii. That sister would later be killed by her brother for weeping at the death of her fiancee.

Answer: Jan Vermeer

If you believe that the viewer's eye focuses where the painting's eyes focus, this suggests that to Vermeer his subjects' professions were at least as important as the subjects themselves.

Like Jacques-Louis David, Vermeer also rewards the viewer for paying attention to the backgrounds and bringing a bit of outside knowledge to his paintings. For example, the dignified image of the milkmaid is cracked slightly once you realize that the tiling over on the right hand side is decorated with an image of a naked Cupid.

Answer: A Shark

"Watson and the Shark" was based on a 1749 incident in which 14-year-old Brook Watson was attacked by a shark, losing his right leg. Copley had likely never seen a shark in his life, and Watson was understandably too busy during the attack to notice anatomical details of his attacker.

Watson (who would go on to become Lord Mayor of London) considered the attack the defining moment of his life, and not only commissioned the painting but had a severed foot put on his coat of arms.

Answer: A skull

The eye in question is Escher's own, sketched based on its reflection in a convex shaving mirror. The print was created by a process known as mezzotint, in which a metal plate is laboriously pricked with tiny holes that hold the ink used in printing.

Although mezzotint was popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, it fell out of favor after photography enabled life-like images to be made at far less cost. Escher's use of the process is a throwback to earlier times, as is the seemingly out-of-place skull. Such skulls were sometimes inserted into Flemish paintings (perhaps most notably Holbein's "The Ambassadors") as a reminder of death's eternal presence.

Answer: David

Why would Michelangelo, master of symmetry, include such a "flaw"? Marc Levoy of Stanford University (who performed the scan) suggests that it was a calculated move. Since a viewer looking at the statue head-on wouldn't normally be able to see both eyes anyway (one is blocked by David's arm), Michelangelo was free to optimize them separately for viewers looking on from each side. From the left, David seems to be looking straight ahead, while from the right, he appears to be gazing off to his left.

In each case, the eye by itself seems perfectly natural.