The Veiled Statuary: A Lesson from Sculpture to Vision Psychology : Supplementary Material
2019
Visual artists can be
considered the precursors of students of the visual system. Paintings and
graphic arts have been attentively examined by vision scientists, while
sculpture has been considered less. Here we intend to fill this gap by
illustrating how artists faced what seems an impossible challenge: to carve a
stone so that it looks like a transparent veil. The success of the artists in
reproducing the veil can be assessed by exploring the hundreds of Internet
pages dedicated to ‘veiled statuary’. We chose some of the most admired statues
and tried to ‘glean’ the sculptor’s technique. Two of these artworks are the
work of Greek artists, the other statues were carved by baroque and modern
sculptors. We did not find a single technique but, rather, a diversity of
solutions, as is to be expected in an exploration in which opposites must be
reconciled: an observer has to catch the presence of something elastic, thin, and
transparent in a surface made of a rigid and opaque material. We checked the
ability of the sculptor to render such properties by submitting samples of
veiled statues to some observers who were asked to judge the strength of the
veiling effect, and to categorize the perceived materials and features, such as
transparency and thinness. The results confirm the artists’ knowledge of visual
cues that are able to convey a complex set of information and meanings:
material categorization, materials properties, perceptual decomposition of
surfaces, completion of perceptual fragments into unitary percepts.
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