Layers of Meaning

Eye-Placement In 500 Years Of Portraits

Something that we never discussed in Art History, and I am feeling the urge to search through my books and check this hypothesis: that in paintings the dominant eye (rather than the nose) is centered within the painting. Christopher W. Tyler of Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute studied 282 portraits created over five hundred years and reached an interesting conclusion: "The eye centering with an accuracy of ~1 eye width is barely mentioned in art criticism, suggesting that unconscious functions operate in our aesthetic judgements."

Tyler offers several hypothesis for his discovery and even has some statistics to prove his theory. I can't speak to the statistical validity, but his theory of eye placement is a great reference to keep in mind when planning a composition!