Apr 27, 2023 08:00:00

Da Vinci and Katsushika Hokusai, who produced excellent works, may have excelled in ``dynamic vision''

The ability to observe other people and the world is important to produce excellent work, whether it is writing a novel or creating a painting. David Thaler, a geneticist at

the University of Basel in Switzerland, believes that the famous Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci and the late Edo-era ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai had the kind of ``like'' that top sports professionals have. It has a 'quick eye' and points out that it may have been possible to observe it as if it were cutting out a moment with excellent dynamic visual acuity.

Did Leonardo da Vinci's 'quick eye' help him capture Mona Lisa's fleeting smile? | Live Science
https://www.livescience.com/leonardo-da-vinci-quick-eye-mona-lisa-smile.html

(PDF file) EVIDENCE FOR EXTRAORDINARY VISUAL ACUITY IN LEONARDO'S COMMENT ON A DRAGONFLY / SFUMATO IN LEONARDO'S PORTRAITS: OPTICAL AND
PSYCHOPHYSICAL MECHANISMS
https://phe.rockefeller.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Leonardo FlickFusionSfumatoPortraitJune182020.pdf

The ability of Quick Eye related to dynamic vision is such that a baseball player can grasp the seam of a ball flying at high speed and grasp the rotation of the ball, and a tennis player can react to the ball's trajectory changing at high speed. It gives a big advantage in sports. According to Mr. Thaler, it seems that people with high Quick Eye ability are considered to be affected by the numerical value of flicker fusion frequency .

Mr. Thaler said that da Vinci had a high flicker fusion frequency and could see changes in the shape of falling water droplets in detail, so he said, ``It's not a fixed pose like Mona Lisa, but it's becoming a smile. Moment,' he said, describing the 'confusion immediately after Christ mentions the traitor in The Last Supper.'

It seems that Mr. Sailor's attention to Da Vinci's observation ability was due to the memo left by Da Vinci about the flight of the dragonfly. The note said, ``Dragonflies fly with four wings, but when the front wings go up, the back wings go down.'' I could only see vague outlines. So, when I started researching ``what it means to have excellent dynamic vision'', I found that the ``back wing'' of the dragonfly was about 1/100th of a second from the ``front wing''. It seems that the speed of 100 times was found to be about twice the frequency of general human flicker fusion. In other words, the fact that the gap between the front and back wings of the dragonfly was captured with the naked eye means that it has the ability of Quick Eye, which has an extremely high frequency of flicker fusion, and the information seen in the normal field of vision is different from that of ordinary people. Thaler points out that it could have been.

Mr. Thaler also points out that the ability of Quick Eye is also appearing in the technique called ``

Sfumato '' seen in Da Vinci's work. Sfumato is the technique of gradually transitioning from light to dark areas of the canvas without borders by building up layers of color to create depth and volume. Ordinary people visualize a momentary scene as ``a cohesive whole with one central focus,'' whereas Sfumato's technique is ``the whole picture recognizes the partial focus of the momentary image. It is a technique that extracts that partial focus after understanding that it is sewn together in the mind. Therefore, Mr. Thaler says that the ability to recognize the momentary focus with the quick eye made it possible to use Sfumato.

Not only Da Vinci, but Katsushika Hokusai, an ukiyo-e artist from the late Edo period, may have had excellent quick eye abilities, Thaler said. Hokusai has created a woodblock print that accurately depicts how the dragonfly in flight moves its wings, and it seems that it is thought that it had an extremely high flicker fusion frequency like Da Vinci.

Thaler's 2020 papers, 'Evidence for Extraordinary Sight from Da Vinci's Comments on Dragonflies' and 'Engineering and Psychophysical Mechanisms in Da Vinci's Portraits,' draw from Renaissance works of art. It is announced as part of the `` Leonardo da Vinci DNA project '' that attempts to collect microorganisms and recover Da Vinci's genetic material. ``If the project finds some kind of base sequence (DNA sequence) related to Da Vinci, I think that Da Vinci's visual ability, which I focus on, will also make great progress,'' says Thaler.