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In the first study, eye and lip size and roundness, and lower-face roundness were compared between a control sample of 289 photographic portraits and an experimental sample of 776 artistic portraits covering the whole period of the history of art. Results showed that eye roundness, lip roundness, eye height, eye width, and lip height were significantly enhanced in artistic portraits compared to photographic ones. Lip width and lower-face roundness, on the contrary, were less prominent in artistic than in photographic portraits. In a second study, forty-two art academy students were requested to draw two self-portraits, one with a mirror and one without (from memory). Eye, lip, and lower-face roundness in artistic self-portraits was compared to the same features derived from photographic portraits of the participants. The results obtained confirmed those found in the first study. Eye and lip size and roundness were greater in artistic self-portraits, while lower-face roundness was significantly reduced. The same degree of modification was found also when a mirror was available to the subjects. In a third study the effect of lower-face roundness on the perception of attractiveness was assessed: fifty-three participants had to adjust the face width of 24 photographic portraits in order to achieve the highest level of attractiveness. Participants contracted the face width by a mean value of 5.26%, showing a preference for a reduced lower-face roundness. All results are discussed in terms of the importance of the 'supernormalisation' process as a means of assigning aesthetic value to perceptual stimuli.
OBJECTIVES: To see whether a collection of portraits depicting inhabitants of a defined geographical region and covering several centuries is a useful source for studying the sociocultural significance and epidemiology of particular visible diseases, such as goitre, which is known to have been common in this region. DESIGN: Systematic review of portraits and description of visible signs of illness. SETTING: The Burgerbibliothek (archives of the burghers' community) in Berne, Switzerland. DATA SOURCES: 3615 portraits; 2989 of individuals whose identity is known and 626 of individuals whose identity is unknown. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Visible signs of illness evaluated by means of a standardised visual assessment. RESULTS: Visible signs of illness in portraits were common and appeared in up to 82% (451/553) of paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries. The most common findings were signs of goitre in women and overweight in men. In only the portraits where the neck region could be evaluated, 41% of women with known identities (139/343) had goitre compared with 24% of men with known identities (21/86). The prevalence of goitre was even higher in sitters whose identities were unknown: 63% in men (5/8) and 68% in women (82/121). Overweight in people with known identities was more common in men than in women (30%, 346/1145 v 44%, 811/1844). Overweight was most common in sitters aged >40 than in those aged 40 or younger. Other conditions, such as missing teeth, amputated limbs, or osteoarthritic deformations were surprisingly rare in the portraits under evaluation. CONCLUSIONS: Goitre and other diseases are under-represented in the people depicted in these portraits. Artistic idealisation is a likely explanation for this observation: what was reproduced depended on what was considered pathological or shameful at the time, and therefore depended on age and sex. Stigmatising details may have been omitted. Further, artistic skills and contemporary fashion may have influenced the way in which people were reproduced. People depicted are possibly not representative of the general Bernese population as they constituted a socioeconomically advantaged group.
Construction of the action potential duration (APD) restitution portrait allows visualization of multiple aspects of the dynamics of periodically paced myocytes at various basic cycle lengths (BCLs). For the first time, we obtained the restitution portrait of isolated rabbit and guinea pig cardiac ventricular myocytes and analyzed the time constant, tau, of APD accommodation and the slopes of different types of restitution curves, Sdyn and S12, measured at varying BCLs. Our results indicate that both tau and the individual slopes are species and pacing dependent. In contrast, the mutual relationship between slopes Sdyn and S12 does not depend on pacing history, being a generic feature of the species. In addition, the maximum slope S12, measured in the restitution portrait at the lowest BCL, predicts the onset of alternans. Further, we investigated the role of the L-type calcium current, ICa-L, in the restitution portrait. We found that ICa-L dramatically affects APD accommodation, as well as the individual slopes Sdyn and S12 measured in the restitution portrait. However, peak calcium current plays a role only at small values of BCL. In conclusion, the results demonstrate that the restitution portrait is a powerful technique to investigate restitution properties of periodically paced cardiac myocytes and the onset of alternans, in particular. Moreover, the data also show that ICa-L plays a crucial role in multiple aspects of cardiac dynamics measured through the restitution portrait.
BACKGROUND: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become a powerful tool for tracking human brain activity in vivo. This technique is mainly based on blood oxygenation level dependence (BOLD) contrast. In the present study, we employed this newly developed technique to characterize the neural representations of human portraits and natural sceneries in the human brain. METHODS: Nine subjects were scanned with a 1.5 T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner using gradient-recalled echo and echo-planar imaging (GRE-EPI) pulse sequence while they were visually presented with 3 types of white-black photographs: natural scenery, human portraits, and scrambled nonsense pictures. Multiple linear regression was used to identify brain regions responding preferentially to each type of stimulus and common regions for both human portraits and natural scenery. The relative contributions of each type of stimulus to activation in these regions were examined using linear combinations of a general linear test. RESULTS: Multiple linear regression analysis revealed two distinct but adjacent regions in both sides of the ventral temporal cortex. The medial region preferentially responded to natural scenery, whereas the lateral one preferentially responded to the human portraits. The general linear test further revealed a distribution gradient such that a change from portraits to scenes shifted areas of activation from lateral to medial. CONCLUSIONS: The boundary between portrait-associated and scenery-associated areas is not as clear as previously demonstrated. The representations of portraits and scenes in ventral temporal cortex appear to be continuous and overlap.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, the 24-year-old Pablo Picasso painted the masterpiece Portrait of Gertrude Stein. The portrait was a landmark and a turning point for both artist and model. The painting, completed in 1906 in Paris, marked a radical stylistic change for Picasso and was a transitional work signaling the beginnings of Cubism. Gertrude Stein, along with her brothers, was a collector of modern art at the turn of the century. Her weekly "salons" in Paris became legendary and provided a place for intellectuals of the day--writers, painters, critics, and poets--to congregate and exchange ideas. Gertrude Stein's collecting was paralleled by her writing of avant-garde prose. Her style was radical and influential, and the construction and syntax of her works was a literary analog of the Cubist artwork she was collecting in the early 1900s. Gertrude Stein became an enduring cultural icon and her portrait stayed with her in France from the time of its creation in 1906, through both World Wars, and until her death in 1946. The portrait remained with her companion, Alice B. Toklas, until its bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Universally recognized as one of the classic and pivotal works of Picasso's late Rose period, Portrait of Gertrude Stein brilliantly captures the psychological character of one of the great American writers and cultural figures of the last century.
Hemiplegic patients suffer from difficulties in self-awareness, either due to specific neurological disturbances of body image or to psychological problems with their I images. Both types of difficulty have to do with the specular image as defined by Lacan (1966a) (i.e., the psychic structure that links the body with the symbolic and imaginary components of identity, and neutralizes the real objects involved in mother-child exchange). This study is devoted to analyzing how recent right and left brain vascular lesions affect specular image. Multivariate Analysis of 308 self-portraits of right and left brain injured stroke patients and control participants was performed. This revealed three dominant types of self-portrait: 1) Erect, complete, and clothed self-portraits were predominantly drawn by normal participants. 2) Erect self-portraits, lacking clothes, hands, and/or mouth and eyes were found in all groups of participants, predominantly in patients with speech disorders. Lack of hands and face features are indications of the challenge brought to the symbolic and imaginary aspects of identity by any sudden handicap, whether or not caused by a brain lesion, while symmetry of lacks and verticality show that body image may retain its structuring value even in brain lesions. 3) This is not the case in neurological disorders of body image, since inclined portraits with unilateral omissions were predominantly drawn by patients with right brain lesions. These unilateral omissions proved not only to result from cognitive deficiencies, but also to reflect the fragmentation of specular image, and in one case, the concomitant undue appearance of the object.
INTRODUCTION: Electrical restitution, relating action potential duration (APD) to diastolic interval (DI), was believed to determine the stability of heart rhythm. However, recent studies demonstrate that stability also depends on long-term APD changes caused by memory. This study presents a new method for investigation of rate- and memory-dependent aspects of restitution and for assessment of mapping models of APD. METHODS AND RESULTS: Bullfrog ventricular myocardium was paced with a "perturbed downsweep protocol." Starting from a basic cycle length (BCL) of 1,000 ms, the tissue was paced until steady state was achieved, followed by single beats of longer and shorter cycle lengths. BCL was decreased by 50 to 100 ms and the process repeated. All APDs were plotted as a function of the preceding DI, which allowed simultaneous observation of dynamic, S1-S2, and two constant-BCL restitution curves in a "restitution portrait." Responses were classified as 1:1 (stimulus:response), transient 2:2, or persistent 2:2 (alternans) and were related to the slopes of the restitution curves. None of these slopes approached unity for the persistent 2:2 response, demonstrating that the traditional restitution condition does not predict alternans. The restitution portrait was used to evaluate three mapping models of APD. The models with no memory and with one-beat memory did not produce restitution portraits similar to the experimental one. A model with two-beat memory produced a qualitatively similar portrait. CONCLUSION: The restitution portrait allows a more comprehensive assessment of cardiac dynamics than methods used to date. Further study of models with memory may result in a clinical criterion for electrical instability.
Many artists have depicted genetic disorders in portrait paintings. In some instances such disorders can be identified in self-portraits, most notably the tetralogy of Fallot in the Dutch painter Dick Ket, or in portraits of the famous, such as the Habsburg jaw in the Emperor Charles V. But it is in other portraits that most examples can be found, such as the different types of dwarfism depicted by Velázquez. A table listing over 70 examples is provided.
For centuries painters have predominantly painted portraits with the model's left-cheek facing the viewer. This has been even more prevalent with females ( approximately 68%) than males ( approximately 56%). Numerous portraits painted by Rembrandt typify this unexplained phenomenon. In a preliminary experiment, subjects judged 24 emotional and social character traits in 20 portraits by Rembrandt. A factor analysis revealed that females with their left cheek exposed were judged to be much less socially appealing than less commonly painted right-cheeked females. Conversely, the more commonly painted right-cheeked males were judged to be more socially appealing than either left-cheeked males or females facing either direction. It is hypothesized that hemispheric asymmetries regulating emotional facial displays of approach and avoidance influenced the side of the face Rembrandt's models exposed due to prevailing social norms. A second experiment had different subjects judge a different collection of 20 portraits by Rembrandt and their mirror images. Mirror-reversed images produced the same pattern of results as their original orientation counterparts. Consequently, hemispheric asymmetries that specify the emotional expression on each side of the face are posited to account for the obtained results.
Among the many engravings of landscapes, buildings, portraits and other illustrations produced by the seventeenth-century artist Wenceslaus Hollar, there are a small number of images of contemporary men of science. Of particular interest is the portrait of the instrument-maker Elias Allen, both because portraits of men of his social status were extremely uncommon at this time, and also because the cluttered mass of instruments shown in the image presents a picture wholly unlike other portraits of the period. The first part of this paper explores the position of portraiture as inherently linked to nobility, and seeks to present an explanation as to why the original oil painting of Allen (made by Hendrik van der Borcht and no longer extant) might have been made. The second part looks at the image itself, and discusses possible reasons for Hollar's production of the engraving some twenty years after the original.
This article examines the portraits of seventeenth-century French accoucheurs [men-midwives] that regularly appeared as the first plate in their obstetrical treatises, representing the body from which the text had issued. It argues that these visual documents were forms of strategic display in keeping with the wider goals of the treatises--to present their authors as cultivated, skilled, and vastly experienced experts in childbirth. At a time when the visual evaluation of character was commonplace within medical and other contexts, author portraits presented the public image of accoucheurs. Before analysing the idealized images of men-midwives. however, the article explores the author portrait of Louise Bourgeois, royal midwife to Queen Marie de Médicis from 1601-9, and the first French woman to write obstetrical treatises. Bourgeois is portrayed not only as an exceptional practitioner granted royal favour, but also as a hybrid figure whose identity fluctuated between efficient female midwife and educated theoretical writer. Portraits of accoucheurs represent the unstable identity and rather flexible 'masculinity' of male practitioners who likewise blurred gendered categories. Some images identify male practitioners exclusively with theoretical knowledge, while others associate them more directly with the maternal qualities traditionally admired in female midwives.
Scientific psychology and neuroscience are taking increasingly precise and comprehensive pictures of the human mind, both in its physical architecture and its functional processes. Meanwhile, each human mind has an abbreviated view of itself, a self-portrait that captures how it thinks it operates, and that therefore has been remarkably influential. The mind's self-portrait has as a central feature the idea that thoughts cause actions, and that the self is thus an origin of the body's actions. This self-portrait is reached through a process of inference of apparent mental causation, and it gives rise to the experience that we are consciously willing what we do. Evidence from several sources suggests that this self-portrait may often be a humble and misleading caricature of the mind's operation-but one that underlies the feeling of authorship and the acceptance of responsibility for action.
This paper is a study of the relationships between optics, right or left handedness and self-portrait, according to the concepts elaborated by Arthur Linksz. Four topics are studied: 1) Image reversal in the looking-glass: making his self-portrait, the painter looks at an self-image in a mirror, and so is copying an image of himself where right and left are, so to speak, inverted; eyes, ears, clothes, and above all, hands: the real right hand is the left hand in the picture, and the real left hand is the right hand in the picture. 2) Due to this reversal, the painter has two possibilities: either he can accept this apparent reversal, and represent himself as left-handed (painting using his left hand); or he can refuse this apparent reversal, and correct the reflected image in the picture. Both these options have in fact been used by painters, depending on whether they painted before or after the birth of photography: before photography, painters, generally, refused to seem left-handed; so, they used many tricks to correct the reflected image: suppression of the two hands in the self-portrait; suppression of the painted left hand (i.e. the real right hand); brushstroke in the painted right hand (i.e. the real left hand) and/or palette in the left painted hand (i.e.; the real right hand); only a few painters accepted to seem appearing left-handed in the self-portrait.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a nursing science perspective to health research. The perspective is outlined using the following key concepts: life control, life situation, health and health choices, resources, and process of change. This conceptual system of health portrait includes concepts used to study health in nursing science. It also reflects a research approach by using empirical examples. As a starting-point, life control is assumed to be reflected in the life situation as well as in health and health choices. As a consequence, life control is also related to each individual's resources in everyday life. Further attention is given to the assessment of the process of change pertaining to health choices during the person's course of life. As an empirical example of the application of the "health portrait" conceptual system, a research project titled Health portrait of adolescents in Kainuu is presented. This project aims to develop an instrument for measuring life control, health and life situation, to evaluate this instrument and to analyze life control data elicited from adolescents. Another aim of this paper is to assess how well an instrument created on the basis of the nursing science and the method of interventive interview used here served as tools for analysing life control and health in the health checkups of school-aged adolescents. On the basis of the knowledge obtained through these analyses we will develop further the conceptual system of health portrait, which could be used as a guideline in health research.
The aim of this study is to elaborate comparative portraits of Korean and Japanese beauty in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Six portraits of beauty in the Korean Joseon Dynasty (early 19th century) and 5 in Japanese Edo Dynasty (late 18th century) were analyzed. Twenty anthropometric items were applied to the measure of the features on each portrait and 18 proportional indices of the face were calculated. Among the 18 indices, Korean and Japanese beauty did not show any significant differences in 13, but in 5: 1) the ratio of eye fissure to intercanthal distance was greater in Japanese beauty; 2) eye inclination was greater in Japanese beauty; 3) the ratio of nasal width to intercanthal distance was greater in Japanese beauty; 4) the ratio of nasal and facial width was greater in Korean beauty; and 5) the ratio of vermilion size to mouth width was greater in Japanese beauty. It is assumed that Korean had narrower eye fissure, lower eye inclination, wider nasal ala, and thinner lip than what Japanese craved during that era.