It has often been suggested that innate features of the human mind could make some cultural forms more successful than others. This paper presents a case study consistent with this “cognitive attraction” hypothesis. Numerous studies show that direct eye-gaze catches the attention of adults and newborns. Adults find it more attractive. We explore one possible cultural consequence of this cognitive appeal. Among XVIth century European portraits, direct-gaze paintings are more likely to be featured in today's art books. In Renaissance Europe, the proportion of paintings that stare at the viewer grows gradually, strongly, and remains prevalent for centuries. A demographic analysis of this shift shows that it was due to the arrival of new generations of painters. Those artists show a preference for direct-gaze portraits as soon as they start painting, suggesting that they acquired the new style in the years of their apprenticeship. The preferences of those painters and of contemporary art critics seem consistent with the innate attentional bias that favours direct-gaze faces. The structure of the “Renaissance gaze shift” bears evidence for the importance of demographic turn-over in cultural change.
You probably have in your wallet, or on your hard disk, a representation of a human face that seems to be looking out of the picture into your eyes. This visual illusion is so common we hardly notice it. Yet its effects on our mind are far from trivial (Wollaston, 1824). As compared to a slightly averted gaze, direct eye-gaze in pictures facilitates identification and gender assignment (Macrae et al., 2002 and Vuilleumier et al., 2005). Direct eye-gaze is attention-grabbing as well. Staring faces make more potent distractors than averted-gaze faces (Conty et al., 2010 and Senju and Hasegawa, 2005). Direct-gaze faces are more arousing, as evidenced by physiological measures such as galvanic skin response (Nichols & Champness, 1971). Direct-gaze pictures of faces (even neutral faces) are rated by subjects as more “likable” or “attractive” (Conway et al., 2008 and Ewing et al., 2010) — but see Hietanen, Leppänen, Peltola, Linna-Aho, and Ruuhiala, (2008). Some of these effects of direct eye-gaze are probably due to innate features of our visual system. Children as young as three days old preferentially look at direct-gaze pictures of still faces (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002). Direct eye-gaze facilitates identification in 4 months-old as it does in adults (Farroni, Massaccesi, Menon, & Johnson, 2007).
The view that a general preference for direct eye-gaze influenced XVIth century portraiture was tested in three different ways. In Study 1, we saw that direct-gaze portraits were more likely to be selected by books gathering the “best” paintings of their tradition. Study 2 showed that Renaissance portraiture gradually evolved towards a strong predominance of direct eye-gaze. Study 3 showed that this shift was due to the gradual replacement of early painters by new generations of painters, who started their career by painting more direct-gaze portraits than their contemporaries, before the shift became tangible.
Young painters of the High Renaissance, although they grew up in a visual culture that differed starkly from ours, seemed to share an aesthetic preference also found in today's art critics and in the subjects of Western psychological experiments. It is tempting to link this preference with our innate propensity to look at direct-gaze faces. This conclusion would be premature, however. Before embracing it, we would like to make sure that the preference of sixteenth-century painters for direct eye-gaze was not itself the product of a historical accident, and that studies 1 and 2 can be replicated in a suitable variety of independent portrait traditions. Two things seem to warrant a careful optimism on both grounds.
