Posted on 12/15/2005 3:42:43 PM PST by nickcarraway
According to findings published in the New Scientist, a British journal, the exact breakdown of Mona Lisa's emotions, as captured by Leonardo da Vinci, were 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry.
The enigma of Leonardo da Vinci's famous Mona Lisa painting has been cracked with the help of emotion-recognition software from scientists at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The painting, which is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, was painted at some point between 1503 and 1506, according to art historians.
After centuries of speculation about what the lady in the picture was thinking about, the software concluded that Mona Lisa was actually happy and only a little disgusted as she sat for Leonardo to paint her portrait.
Mostly Happy
According to findings published in the New Scientist, a British journal, the exact breakdown of Mona Lisa's emotions, as captured by Leonardo da Vinci, were 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry.
Dr. Nicu Sebe, a professor at the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, used emotion-recognition software to come up with the exact breakdown of Mona Lisa's emotional state.
The software was developed with the help of Professor Thomas Huang, a group leader at the Image Formation and Processing Faculty at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Read My Lips
Sibu specializes in human-computer interaction, or HCI, a technology that allows computers to respond to human beings appropriately by reading the expression on their faces. He used HCI software to create a 3D computer image of Mona Lisa.
This image was compared with images of other women in Sibu's database to quantify the emotion depicted in Leonardo's portrait.
The software looks at features such as the curvature of the lips and crinkles around the eyes to score six basic emotions. It scored Mona Lisa for happiness, disgust, fear, and anger, but found no evidence of surprise or sadness.
Other applications of emotion-recognition software might be to detect terror suspects on the basis of their emotions as well as their physical characteristics.
Professor Huang specializes in computerized image handling. He also is working on image-recognition software that will allow databases of images to be searched on the basis of their visual content rather than the textual title given to them.
She stayed at a Holiday Inn Express the night before?
'Course Not: she was the wife of a (Venician?) Banker.
Yes, I've heard that--she's pregnant. Personally, I think she farted.
And 15% drunk :-)
How do you know they weren't playing opera?
OK, I laughed.
After a particularly romantic evening with bubble bath and candles and wine and back-rubs and ...
but maybe she was just a little miffed at the thing he tried to do with the kitchen spatula ...
Anyone ever see the beginning of "Hudson Hawk" ?
Da Vinci sees the model dozing next to the painting with the mouth part unfinished. He claps her hands to wake her. She wakes up and smiles with a mouthful of rotten teeth.
Mona Lisa had meth mouth?
LOL!!! I don't either................
From a non art critic's point of view, I always thought Mona was just an unemployed broad earning a couple of bucks by being painted by an unemployed aluminum siding salesman.........
Or maybe she was his student.
"The Da Vinci Coed"?
Gracias muchas...nice profile you've got...I'm a grandpa too, that's why the wife had to stay. the first grand was born right before the trip.
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But apparantly only two ways in.
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