During her doctoral research on the importance of replicas in art history, Liselore Tissen came across a curiosity. Despite there being other equally famous works in the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, Johannes Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring seemed to captivate those who stood in front of the image in a special way.
It wasn’t a small difference, and the museum itself is aware that the time visitors spend scrutinizing Vermeer’s painting is up to ten times longer than with the rest of the works. Until a few weeks ago, that was just a simple detail to surprise museum visitors with.
The charm of Girl with a Pearl Earring
Earning a Best Actress nomination for her role as Griet, the maid who starts working in the home of the Dutch painter and ends up transformed into the Girl with a Pearl Earring, Scarlett Johansson and her BAFTA nomination further extended the fame of the painting based on an equally acclaimed novel of the same name.
So the explanation for the time people spent on the painting in recent years could be linked to its fame, the fact that its reproductions are everywhere on bags and t-shirts, or that people even know it from the aforementioned movie. But what if there was something more?
In collaboration with a neuroresearch team, they decided to analyze what happens in the brain when someone stands before the painting. After the test, they captured something they hadn’t seen before, people were trapped in a sustained attention loop.
Measured by electrodes on the head and eye-tracking devices, they discovered that when you stand in front of Girl with a Pearl Earring, your eyes automatically move to hers, then to her mouth, and then to the pearl. After that, you return to her mouth, her eyes, the pearl. And then start over.
Beyond that endless loop, the brain scan revealed that, unlike other analyzed works, this one showed a special peak of activity in the precuneus, the part of the brain that manages functions like consciousness, self-reflection, and deals with managing personal life experiences. Along with sustained attention, that emotional impact seems to be responsible for us spending up to 10 minutes in front of the painting when, in the case of others, we barely last one.
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