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My two-cents on the deeply offensive on so many levels (mysognistic, homophoboic, anti-science, anti-integrity, there are about a million more I missed) survey that's been going around.
The deep stupidity and offensiveness has been amply documented with more eloquence and patience than I have elsewhere. link spam here
Just want to chime with a little perspective from my own academic field (although my period is the 20th c., not the Renaissance). I posted this in ellen_fremedon's journal but want it here for my own reference.
Can I just say that the whole Mona Lisa example [that ogi-ogas uses to explain his research and explain how one draws conclusions about the brain from experiential data] pisses me the hell off!
From ogi-ogas: "The Mona Lisa smile is often characterized as "enigmatic." Why? Because when you look directly at the smile, it appears she's not smiling. When you look to her side, she does appear smiling."
Really? Because I look at her and see that she's smiling, but not grinning. Is that so complicated? Who has often characterized her smile as "enigmatic"? Citation? (To be fair, there are some.) Want another reason why that may be? Or at least other contributing factors? Let's try culture.
The "enigmatic smile" meme has cultural roots, although relatively shallow ones. It emerged with romanticism in the 19th c., for *hundreds of years* before that the painting was praised for its fidelity to reality and she was described as smiling, full stop.
"And in this picture of Leonardo's, there was a smile so pleasing, that the sight of it was a thing more divine than human; and it was held to be a marvel, in that it was not other than alive"* --Vasari 1550 (The earliest description, to be fair, Vasari probably hadn't even seen the painting when he described it but he is/was so famous that everyone reads/read him and he influences a lot of later art criticism).
Nothing enigmatic. Then in the 19th c. we get the romantic writers and all the flowery descriptions. Did our brains evolve to see enigmatic smiles in the 19th century?
How many of us heard about the "enigmatic smile" before we'd ever even seen a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Do you think that influenced how we visually interpreted her expression? Maybe a little? Not that cultural expectations can contribute to things that are so "obvious" and "natural" like how women express their sexuality.
Even visual perception and interpretation isn't clear cut, never mind something as complex as sexuality.
*Quoted in Mona Lisa, by Kenneth Clark The Burlington Magazine © 1973, p. 145
The deep stupidity and offensiveness has been amply documented with more eloquence and patience than I have elsewhere. link spam here
Just want to chime with a little perspective from my own academic field (although my period is the 20th c., not the Renaissance). I posted this in ellen_fremedon's journal but want it here for my own reference.
Can I just say that the whole Mona Lisa example [that ogi-ogas uses to explain his research and explain how one draws conclusions about the brain from experiential data] pisses me the hell off!
From ogi-ogas: "The Mona Lisa smile is often characterized as "enigmatic." Why? Because when you look directly at the smile, it appears she's not smiling. When you look to her side, she does appear smiling."
Really? Because I look at her and see that she's smiling, but not grinning. Is that so complicated? Who has often characterized her smile as "enigmatic"? Citation? (To be fair, there are some.) Want another reason why that may be? Or at least other contributing factors? Let's try culture.
The "enigmatic smile" meme has cultural roots, although relatively shallow ones. It emerged with romanticism in the 19th c., for *hundreds of years* before that the painting was praised for its fidelity to reality and she was described as smiling, full stop.
"And in this picture of Leonardo's, there was a smile so pleasing, that the sight of it was a thing more divine than human; and it was held to be a marvel, in that it was not other than alive"* --Vasari 1550 (The earliest description, to be fair, Vasari probably hadn't even seen the painting when he described it but he is/was so famous that everyone reads/read him and he influences a lot of later art criticism).
Nothing enigmatic. Then in the 19th c. we get the romantic writers and all the flowery descriptions. Did our brains evolve to see enigmatic smiles in the 19th century?
How many of us heard about the "enigmatic smile" before we'd ever even seen a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Do you think that influenced how we visually interpreted her expression? Maybe a little? Not that cultural expectations can contribute to things that are so "obvious" and "natural" like how women express their sexuality.
Even visual perception and interpretation isn't clear cut, never mind something as complex as sexuality.
*Quoted in Mona Lisa, by Kenneth Clark The Burlington Magazine © 1973, p. 145
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