
Leonardo Just Accepted MS. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02061 © 2021 ISAST Pareidolia and the Pitfalls of Subjective Interpretation of Ambiguous Images in Art History Raquel G. Wilner (art historian, independent researcher), Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand London WC2R 0RN, United Kingdom. Email: <[email protected]> © ISAST Manuscript received 15 January 2020. Abstract In art history, we sometimes discover hidden images within a picture and conduct a subjective introspective analysis on the painter’s motivation behind these images. I argue that many such highly ambiguous hidden images are better explained by the pareidolia phenomenon: the tendency to find patterns in random stimuli. The arguments brought forth by Sidney Geist and Dario Gamboni illustrate the pitfalls and controversy of subjective visual analysis and how a perceptual phenomenon can mislead our conclusions. This paper proposes that this controversy can be approached by establishing pictorial intent: did the artist deliberately paint the hidden image, or is it merely a perceptual artefact? Sometimes artists make use of perceptual phenomena to create ambiguous images within their pictures. An example is Salvador Dali’s Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940), where two women, a man’s back, and a background archway together form the shape of Voltaire’s head. In psychology, this is called a figure-ground relation of visual perception, or a reversible figure, and our attention is limited to perceiving one image in Slave Market at a time [1]. This face identification relates to a perceptual phenomenon called pareidolia: a tendency to perceive patterns in visual and auditory stimuli when those patterns only coincidentally produce a familiar configuration, such as seeing faces in clouds or animals in rocks (Fig. 1). It is similar to the gestalt phenomenon, which involves seeing wholes based on the sum of its parts. However, unlike gestalt designs, pareidolia effects are always coincidental. The pareidolia phenomenon has become a popular occurrence on the internet, with people finding faces in a variety of objects ranging from bread to sinks [2]. This occurs because our brains are constantly attempting to make sense of our perceived environment, even to the point of creating illusory patterns and connections [3]. Pareidolia occurs because of a tendency to find false positives, a possible survival mechanism that has evolved through natural selection [4]. Fig. 1. Example of pareidolia: lion’s head in rock formation. (Photo by Ivan Marinov, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.) Raquel G. Wilner, Pareidolia and the Pitfalls of Subjective 1 Interpretation of Ambiguous Images in Art History Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/leon_a_02061/1894174/leon_a_02061.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Leonardo Just Accepted MS. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02061 © 2021 ISAST Pareidolia and Art History Art history is no stranger to illusion, but the concept of pareidolia appears to have largely escaped art historians [5]. The term was first coined by Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum in 1866 [6]. Older descriptions of pareidolia can be found in Alberti’s On Painting [7], who writes: ‘They probably occasionally observed in a tree-trunk or clod of earth and other similar inanimate objects certain outlines in which, with slight alterations, something very similar to the real faces of Nature was represented… (p. 9).’ Leonardo da Vinci also described seeing figures and landscapes on wall stains and stone [8] and in Shakespeare’s Hamlet the characters see animals in clouds [9]. Pareidolia is most commonly associated with perceiving faces. This occurs because our brains have a unique facial processing system, which has evolved over 30 million years, and anything even remotely face-like will activate it [10]. In fact, an area of the brain called the fusiform gyrus brain area activates both when we see an actual face and when we experience a pareidolia effect [11]. We initially recognize a stimulus as a face by identifying its key features: eyes, mouth and nose, which our perceptual system puts together into a whole [12]. In Arcimboldo paintings, which are pictures of objects such as fruits and vegetables that together create a portrait of a person, spectators focus on the ‘eyes’. [13]. Similarly, focus is on the faces in Ilya Repin’s An Unexpected Visitor (1884-1888), particularly the eyes and mouths [14]. Artists are an interesting exception to this rule, and tend to look more freely around without showing any noticeable emphasis on faces [15]. We also appear to be biased towards finding faces: in one study, 39% of participants claimed to see faces in randomly generated images of static white noise [16]. Pareidolia helps explain why we sometimes see a face in a painting and wonder whether the artist put it there deliberately. There is no doubt that the reversible images in Slave Market were put there intentionally, particularly because the title primes the viewer to find them. However, because our brains are tuned to look for such images in all stimuli, it follows that we may also detect patterns or hidden images in ambiguous pictures where the artist’s intention is not known. Sometimes the premise behind discussions on such ambiguous images is the presumption that it was deliberately placed there by the artist. This could potentially lead to wrongful conclusions, as the image may simply be a perceptual artefact. I will illustrate the pitfalls of such interpretations through the approaches to ambiguous images by two authors, Sidney Geist and Dario Gamboni, who proposed that Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, respectively, placed hidden images in their pictures either deliberately or unconsciously. Cézanne’s ‘Cryptomorphs’ In his book, Interpreting Cézanne, Geist [17] suggests that the artist unconsciously placed hidden portraits in his paintings, and he often attempts to justify these claims through circumstantial and ambiguous evidence from letters. The hidden images are called ‘cryptomorphs’ and are often hard to detect. A supposed hidden face is found in The Large Bathers (1906, Fig. 2): Geist claims the trees outline the hair, the top of the white cloud forms an eyebrow, with an iris underneath in the foliage, and the shoreline across the river is the mouth. Geist paradoxically believes this image was not consciously placed there, stating that the eye is ‘placed with Raquel G. Wilner, Pareidolia and the Pitfalls of Subjective 1 Interpretation of Ambiguous Images in Art History Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/leon_a_02061/1894174/leon_a_02061.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Leonardo Just Accepted MS. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02061 © 2021 ISAST anatomical precision,’ but also that ‘nothing that we know of Cézanne leads us to think that he willed it or knew that he made it [18].’ Fig. 2. Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers (1906). Oil on canvas, 210.5 cm x 250.8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.) The alternative approach is that Geist is simply experiencing pareidolia when viewing Cézanne’s pictures, and that he perceives something face-like in the painting. This leads him to make inferences about the inner workings of Cézanne’s mind, where his unconscious is guiding his hand and planting hidden faces in his paintings without the artist being overtly aware of doing so. There are possible exceptions to Geist’s overanalysis of pareidolia effects, such as Poplars (c.1880, Fig. 3). Geist claims the title is very similar to the French word for people (peuple), and he sees the shapes of several human figures amongst the trees. Even if we accept that this play on words from Cézanne was deliberate, we do not need to find hidden images in the picture for the pun to work: the trees may act as metaphors for people, and not necessarily as literal depictions of them. Raquel G. Wilner, Pareidolia and the Pitfalls of Subjective 2 Interpretation of Ambiguous Images in Art History Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/leon_a_02061/1894174/leon_a_02061.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Leonardo Just Accepted MS. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02061 © 2021 ISAST Fig. 3 Paul Cézanne, Poplars (c.1880). Oil on canvas, 65 cm x 80 cm. Musée d’Orsay, France. (Photo courtesy of WikiMedia Commons) Gauguin’s ‘Aspects’ Gamboni, like Geist, uses subjective analysis to find hidden images in Gauguin’s work, and substantiates these claims through letters the artist has written [19]. These ‘aspects’, as Gamboni calls them, allude to ambiguous images within images that take form, and are interpreted, in the spectator’s mind. Gamboni outlines many hidden aspects in Gauguin’s paintings, such as a supposed face between a tree and a bush in an untitled drawing (Woman and Child before a Landscape – c.1888-9), or how the leaves of two trees in View of Pont-Aven from Lézaven (1888-1889) form a face [20]. These hidden faces are best explained as accidental configurations perceived through pareidolia – or, as Gamboni states, in the spectator’s mind. One case of a hidden image is substantiated by technical evidence: the hidden portrait found in Gauguin’s Seascape with Cow on the Edge of a Cliff (1888, Fig. 4). The quasi-flattened foreground of this painting gives room to a confusing space. The hidden image appears to pop- out from the disjointed background, revealing itself in the water wedged between the cliffs. It is allegedly the profile of the artist facing towards our right: there is a long thin neck; a pointy chin (the artist’s beard); his iconic aquiline nose; and lastly, a beret at the top. In addition to its similarity to portraits of Gauguin, an X-ray of the picture implies that the artist had gone over it multiple times, suggesting intent [21].
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