When I first laid eyes on the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris, for example, I was drawn to Leonardo da Vinci's small masterpiece by the famous smile and struck by how the face before me appeared unified and immediately recognizable. Yet I knew that behind that familiar face was an illusion. I thought of Picasso's portrait of Dora Maar, who was the artist's muse, model, and lover. Picasso's fractured perspective creates facial features that have seemingly unnatural relationships and proportions. Most of us find da Vinci's Mona Lisa much closer to the way we normally perceive the world than Dora's disjointed planes. But the brain makes us who we are from a jumble of components that are fragmented and distributed through the cortex and thalamus in a way. that is analogous to the way Picasso sometimes painted.
Pablo Picasso - Portrait of Dora Maar (1937)
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