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Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing
 
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Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing [Paperback]

M Livingstone (Author), David Huble (Author)
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Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing + Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See + Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
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More About the Author

Margaret Livingstone
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Product Description

Product Description

We recognize the artistry of Mona Lisa's elusive smile, but is there an underlying science? In this groundbreaking study, Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone explains how vision works. She tells us how great painters fool the brain: why Mona Lisa's smile seems so mysterious, Monet's "Poppy Field" appears to sway in the breeze, Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie Woogie" blinks like the lights of Times Square, and Warhol's "Electric Chair" pulses with current. Drawing on history and her own cutting-edge discoveries, Livingstone offers intriguing insights, from explanations of common optical illusions to speculations on the correlation of learning disabilities with artistic skill.

About the Author

Margaret Livingstone is Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. She has published numerous scholarly articles about vision and her discoveries have been reported in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and National Geographic, among other mainstream periodicals. David Hubel, Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, shared the 1981 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

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Customer Reviews

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Amazon.com:  20 reviews
79 of 82 people found the following review helpful
First rate science meets oil painting. 13 Sep 2002
By Michael Reding - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a really neat book but the title is a misleading. It doesn't cover all visual art but concentrates on oil painting. The author is a neurophysiologist at Havard Med who can actually write intelligbly, entertainingly and accessibly about her field and how it intersects with 2 dimensional art. It is not an easy read. The book is chock full of visual illusions, detailed illustrations, carefully chosen paintings from the last 500 years and quotations from the scientists who have studied light, color and vision. The last chapter covers electronic media in the form of computer and TV screens and was particularly good but seemed to lack integration with the rest of the manuscript. Overall, this book is delighfully dense. Take some time and savor it.
47 of 49 people found the following review helpful
Shows you how you see and how you paint 16 Jan 2004
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
Margaret Livingstone has produced a book so very useful to visual artists that it may, in its density of ideas, seem definitive rather than evocative. But evocative it is. As we learn from studying it, Livingstone's book offers implications that may be developed by any artist who reads it in almost any direction. One might take as an example the very rich Chapter 8, with its notions of luminance as a balance for the salience, or pushiness of certain colors - how Leonardo handled it, how Ingres handled it, and how today's painter or digital image maker might go even further. The size and shape of the book allow for illustrations that work on the eye at the right scale. And there is an overall visual loudness to the book that is jarring and satisfying.

The author gets to the structure of our visual systems, makes them very clear, and tells us things that are lasting and verifiable. Her spirit of personal experimentation shows in the book, and makes us think that looking inquisitively at the world will pay off.

53 of 57 people found the following review helpful
Fascinating Science of Visual Art 9 Jun 2003
By Coleman Yee - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
Some teasers on the back cover:

"Why do Claude Monet's fields of flowers seem to wave in the breeze?"

"What is the secret of Mona Lisa's smile?"

The first two chapters cover some scientific fundamentals- how light and the human vision works. While this is all very scientific, every effort is made to make it understandable, with plenty of full-color diagrams illustrating the concepts. While these 2 chapters are not the easiest to read, they're not rocket science either, and provide a valuable foundation for the rest of the book. Not essential but VERY useful.

Things start to get interesting toward the end of the 2nd chapter, when we start to understand what a red/green colorblind person sees. But the best stuff starts to come in the third chapter ("Luminance and Night Vision"). Plenty of interesting illustrations are provided in this chapter (like red cherries in a blue bowl, where the cherries appear brighter or darker than the bowl depending on the ambient light, or flickering polkadots), and continues until the rest of a book, making it a truly fascinating read.

Oh, and the explanation on Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile is very convincing.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in both visual art and science.
I also recommend it to anyone who's interested in science and how things work- you'll appreciate some art pieces a lot more after reading this book.

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