A recent study revealed that a viewer’s emotional response to a painting is ten times more intense when viewing the original as opposed to a copy. The research involved five paintings, including Johannes Vermeer’s 1665 work Girl With a Pearl Earring, which was the piece that participants viewed for the longest.
The paintings seem to softly glow under the display lights at the Mauritshuis museum in the Netherlands, where the research was conducted. Scientists used electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets, MRI machines, and eye trackers to monitor participants’ brain activity, and compared the results when the participants viewed the original five paintings in the museum versus when they viewed five posters of the paintings in the museum gift shop.
The enigmatic Girl with a Pear Earring received the most attention from viewers in the study. In this entrancing painting, a girl wearing a head wrap and a pearl earring turns her head toward the viewer, glancing over her shoulder, her mouth slightly open, her lips wetted, her eyes speaking a wordless but intense message in an almost imploring look. An utterly dark background adds to the mystery of the painting and emphasizes the luminosity of the girl’s face by contrast. She emerges from the darkness of history, lifelike, multifaceted, lovely, though we do not know her name. Some word seems to hover on her lips, but it is too solemn, or too terrible, or too beautiful to say out loud.
The recent study captured data on what viewers looked at the most in the painting. Onlookers’ gazes rotated from the girl’s eyes to the mouth to the pearl and back to the eyes, a pattern known as a “sustained attentional loop.” Moreover, this painting awakened the precuneus—the part of the brain related to sense of identity, agency, self-reflection, and autobiographical memory—more than the other paintings did. But all the original paintings stimulated the brain more than the copies did.
As one of the researchers, Martin de Munnik, stated:
With the EEG, you see that the positive effect of the real work is much bigger than with seeing posters, even though they were viewed in the museum too. There was a ten times greater ‘approach’ signal than with the posters.
The question is, why? Why does the original have so much more impact than the copies? It’s the same image, after all.
I think the findings of this study point to the primacy of direct experience, the way that it trumps any form of mediation or artificiality. We were made to see, taste, touch, smell, and hear basic reality directly, and we are wired to respond most to that which we most directly encounter.
We see a parallel in the difference between listening to live music versus a recording: something of the rawness, the humanness, the variability of a live performance is lost on the recording. It is too packaged. Too preformulated. Too controlled. Too “perfect.”
Real human beings and (by extension) human life, on the other hand, are not predictable, prepackaged, or perfect. Human beings are not machines that perform the same action or play the same piece of music identically every time—I know this firsthand from my experience in live theater. Every performance is different, and that’s part of the joy. Repetitive rigidity belongs to robotics, to machines, to dead things—not to living human beings.
But what about the painting hanging in the museum, which, of course, doesn’t change from one viewing to the next? Even so, I maintain there is more authenticity, more unmediated and direct experience of reality and humanity, when you see the artwork in the museum versus on the computer or in a book. For one thing, you can see it in its full scale, not compressed on a poster or page. You can move around it, see it from different angles, encounter the physicality of the frame and materials. Your senses are more engaged.
But maybe most importantly, you are looking on the very same object that the painter looked on. You see the same daubs of physical paint that his hand laid down. The painting becomes a more direct line of communication between artist and viewer, a shared gift, an unspoken message.
And just as there can only be one iteration of any given live musical performance, there can only be one original Girl With a Pearl Earring—countless copies of it may fly off the printer, but none of them are the one. None of them possess the same substantiality as the original or its enduring historical reality, its unique identity over time, flowing from painter’s mind to painter’s hand to canvas and, finally, to you.
In this way, live music or original works of art touch the heart more profoundly than copies or recordings. Their authentic humanity moves us. Like an individual human soul, each one is utterly unique and irreplaceable.
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Image credit: public domain
