What do we see when we see a painting? Javier Solana, President of the Board of Trustees of the Prado Museum, asked himself this Monday: we are not all looking at the same thing or at the same place, and in front of Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” in particular, the visitor sees hell rather than paradise.
This shows the result of a scientific study in which Prado collaborated with the Biomedical Neuroengineering group of the Miguel Hernández University (UHM) in Alicante.
The technology used in the study recorded the subjects’ position in space, measured the time each watched El Bosco’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” – one of the most visited – and which part of the work they paid the most attention to.
Bosch painted this triptych in 1500, which he conceived as a conversation piece as its owners, at its first destination, invited the elite of the time to speak about it.
The study was conducted over three days in January between 2:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. 52 people of different nationalities took part, between 10 and 70 years old, 60 percent women and 40 percent men.
“It’s not a very large sample, but it’s representative to assess the data,” noted Eduardo Fernández Jover, director of the Biomedical Neuroengineering Research Group at UMH.
According to Fernández Jover, the research’s expectations were “more than expected” because one of its goals was to provide blind people with some functional vision using brain stimulation, in addition to helping them with tasks such as orientation or mobility.
To do that, “knowing where to look is very important, and having this table with so many areas to focus our attention on helps us know what might be more important,” considering the ones they provide available technology. he clarifies.
Participants observed the painting using glasses with wireless cameras that gave them a “fresh and real” visualization of their eye movements, noting that the observation of the bright panel was 33.2 seconds/sq.m. compared to 26 of the central table and the 16 of paradise.
In addition, they were also able to record the size of the pupils in parallel with the observation, which provides relevant information about emotional reactions.
“When they look to God, their pupils dilate more.” And in the Table of Hell, with the vision of the severed ears and the knife, also passes,” Fernández Jover points out.
A technology that has made it possible to observe every detail in the gaze of visitors, their forgetting, their fixation on something specific, their looking again or the fact that, due to the size of the canvas, the lower and upper parts are the least observed.
The researchers have not determined whether curiosity or fear of Hell or the fact that the painter’s mysterious portrait is on this side of the painting determines the view of him, but they did make an iconographic measurement based on observations of the time like fountains or some birds to create a “heatmap” of the areas that draw the most attention.
This look, from a scientific and not just an artistic point of view, will not be limited to this painting, as the museum has commented, but will also be continued on other emblematic paintings in the art gallery, including “Las Meninas” by Velázquez.