Trivia Junction

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Catching the Mona Lisa Smile

Margaret Livingstone was once as perplexed by the Mona Lisa's smile as anyone else. In Italian, it's called sfumato, – blurred or ambiguous – but Livingstone, a Harvard University neuroscientist, needed a more concrete explanation.

She got it by looking. “I noticed a kind of flickering quality. But it wasn't until later that I realized what it was. The smile came and went as a function of where my eyes were.”

The human eye has two distinct regions, a central area, called the fovea, that picks out details, and the peripheral area that sees motion and shadows. When she looked at Mona Lisa's eyes, Livingstone's peripheral vision picked up shadows from Mona Lisa's cheekbones. The shadows suggested and enhanced the curvature of a smile.

But when Livingstone looked directly at the mouth, her fovea focused in on the details, and the shadows disappeared along with the smile. “You'll never be able to catch her smile,” says Livingstone, “by looking at her mouth.”

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