From prehistoric times, man has felt the urge to depict the surrounding world on various substrates by using coloured materials. Historical paintings, such as prehistoric cave paintings, are often called ‘windows on the past’ and have allowed later generations to imagine how former human societies looked and/or functioned. Historical paintings are, therefore, considered to be a very valuable pa...

The influence of paintings on short time interval perception was studied. Three methods for time estimation were tested: direct scaling and two modifications of the method of reproduction – with and without simultaneous presentation of the painting whose duration was, reproduced. The results show that short time interval perception is influenced by such complex stimuli as paintings. The motor r...

Renaissance Italian painters are among the most innovative and consequential artists in human history. They were also successful managers business owners, always search of commissions for their workshops. Indeed, ability as entrepreneurs was just important talent painting. This paper develops a framework to understand organization production paintings—frescoes altarpieces—during Renaissance. We...

Recently it has been claimed that some early Renaissance painters used concave mirrors to project real inverted images onto their supports (paper, canvas, oak panel, ...) which they then traced or painted over, and that this was a key source of an apparent increase in naturalism and realism in European painting around 1420. This bold theory makes implicit and explicit assumptions about the illu...

Indeterminate art, in which familiar objects are only suggestive, invokes a perceptual conundrum as apparently detailed and vivid images resist identification. We hypothesized that compared with paintings that depict meaningful content, object recognition in indeterminate images would be delayed, and tested whether aesthetic affect depends on meaningful content. Subjects performed object recogn...

This study examined the effect of inaccurate perspective on the impression of paintings by means of the protocol analysis of observers’ free talking. Participants observed two paintings by renowned artists used as stimuli in two conditions, either simultaneously (Exp.1) or with 1-week interval (Exp.2). In the original condition, they were presented in their original form drawn in inaccurate per...

We used event-related fMRI to investigate whether recollection- and familiarity-based memory judgments are modulated by the degree of visual similarity between old and new art paintings. Subjects performed a flower detection task, followed by a Remember/Know/New surprise memory test. The old paintings were randomly presented with new paintings, which were either visually similar or visually dif...

In the present study, we examined the eye movement behaviour of children and adults looking at five Van Gogh paintings in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The goal of the study was to determine the role of top-down and bottom-up attentional processes in the first stages of participants' aesthetic experience. Bottom-up processes were quantified by determining a salience map for each painting. Top...