Jeroen Stumpel

Facial Types in Painting and Recognition Skills: Laymen as Connoisseurs

The history of art attribution in painting demonstrates that connoisseurs compare faces and facial features in their efforts to ascribe paintings to regions, schools, workshops and specific artists. Connoisseurs do not generally reflect on their application of face recognition or its importance. Since connoisseurs apply both specialist perception skills (recognising a brushstroke technique, for instance) and generic perception skills, an experiment was performed aiming to eliminate a connoisseur’s specialist skills. The experiment was performed using laymen observing faces, derived from paintings, that were stripped from all contextual information (i.e., cut-out faces). Thus, only generic skills could be applied in order to categorise these pictures. The results show how laymen arrive at the same categorisation of paintings as connoisseurs do, without prior training in matters of artistic connoisseurship.

Address by Aad Nuis, State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science at the opening of the Congress on Sunday 1 September 1996 in Amsterdam

Art history is about looking. To you as art historians that may seem a statement of the obvious, but some people may find it odd that the history of art takes as its focus the visual arts and architecture but not, for example, poetry or music. There are undoubtedly good reasons for this, but it would not surprise me if it was not in part related to the wide-spread notion that when it comes to perception, it is the eyes that matter most. I believe this to be a mistaken view. It is the ears, not the eyes, that are most important to perception. For people can close their eyes, but they cannot close their ears, as any seasoned conference-goer well knows. But the real looking and hearing is something we do not with our eyes or ears, but with our hearts.