Reliable Top-Left Light Convention Starts With Early Renaissance: An Extensive Approach Comprising 10k Artworks

• Main Authors: Claus-Christian Carbon, Alexander Pastukhov
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2018-04-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: empirical aesthetics; light source; renaissance; artworks; art history; laterality
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00454/full
• ISSN: 1664-1078

Art history claims that Western art shows light from the top left, which has been repeatedly shown with narrow image sets and simplistic research methods. Here we employed a set of 10,000 pictures for which participants estimated the direction of light plus their confidence of estimation. From 1420 A.D., the onset of Early Renaissance, until 1900 A.D., we revealed a clear preference for painting light from the top left—within the same period, we observed the highest confidence in such estimations of the light source.One sentence summaryThis study demonstrates a robust preference for painting light from the top left for Western art history, starting from Early Renaissance until 1900.