Abstract
Painters mastered replicating the regularities of the visual patterns that we use to infer different materials and their properties, via meticulous observation of the way light reveals the world’s textures. The convincing depiction of bunches of grapes is particularly interesting. A convincing portrayal of grapes requires a balanced combination of different material properties, such as glossiness, translucency and bloom, as we learn from the 17th-century pictorial recipe by Willem Beurs. These material properties, together with three-dimensionality and convincingness, were rated in experiment 1 on 17th-century paintings, and in experiment 2 on optical mixtures of layers derived from a reconstruction of one of the 17th-century paintings, made following Beurs’s recipe. In experiment 3 only convincingness was rated, using again the 17th-century paintings. With a multiple linear regression, we found glossiness, translucency and bloom not to be good predictors of convincingness of the 17th-century paintings, but they were for the reconstruction. Overall, convincingness was judged consistently, showing that people agreed on its meaning. However, the agreement was higher when the material properties indicated by Beurs were also rated (experiment 1) than if not (experiment 3), suggesting that these properties are associated with what makes grapes look convincing. The 17th-century workshop practices showed more variability than standardization of grapes, as different combinations of the material properties could lead to a highly convincing representation. Beurs’s recipe provides a list of all the possible optical interactions of grapes, and the economic yet effective image cues to render them.
Highlights
IntroductionAccording to Willem Beurs (1692; Lehmann and Stumpel, in press), a 17th century Dutch painter, convincingly painted grapes look threedimensional, glossy, translucent and partly covered with bloom (a waxy coating that naturally occurs on grapes, resulting in a whitish, matte appearance)
Corresponding author e-mail address: f.dicicco@tudelft.nl. What does it take to paint convincing grapes? According to Willem Beurs (1692; Lehmann and Stumpel, in press), a 17th century Dutch painter, convincingly painted grapes look threedimensional, glossy, translucent and partly covered with bloom. We studied whether these material properties explain the perceived convincingness of grapes depicted in 17th century paintings, and how the pictorial cues that Beurs (1692; Lehmann and Stumpel, in press) prescribed to trigger their perception relate to the perceived material properties
To the contrary of experiment 1, the stimuli of experiment 2 represented variations of the same bunch of grapes, with a clear depiction of the bloom which made it easier to interpret it in a highly consistent way. This was confirmed by the high correlation between bloom perception and the weights of the bloom layer in experiment 2, indicating that the bloom cue was a clear trigger of bloom perception for the reproduced bunch of grapes
Summary
According to Willem Beurs (1692; Lehmann and Stumpel, in press), a 17th century Dutch painter, convincingly painted grapes look threedimensional, glossy, translucent and partly covered with bloom (a waxy coating that naturally occurs on grapes, resulting in a whitish, matte appearance). We studied whether these material properties explain the perceived convincingness of grapes depicted in 17th century paintings, and how the pictorial cues that Beurs (1692; Lehmann and Stumpel, in press) prescribed to trigger their perception relate to the perceived material properties. Perception studies referring to the knowledge of painters have mostly focused on depth perception of 3D space and objects in 2D representations (Koenderink et al, 1994; Zimmerman et al, 1995; Koenderink et al, 2011; Wijntjes, 2013; Pepperell & Ruschkowski, 2013; Wijntjes et al, 2016). Little attention has been paid to what artists have already discovered about material perception, a recent core topic in vision science (Adelson, 2001; Fleming et al, 2015)
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