A Study on Extracting Attractive Regions from One-Point Perspective Paintings

According to Takashina’s research on art history, Ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) painters began to use the vanishing point as a mechanism to attract viewer’s point of view. They did this by setting the main motif on the vanishing point. In this study, we attempted to clarify experimentally the effect created by a composition in which a painter draws the main motif on the vanishing point of a one-point perspective. For this purpose, we performed an experiment to measure gaze points in viewing paintings. In the experiment, we presented six paintings: two paintings with main motifs on the vanishing points, two edited paintings in which the main motifs on the vanishing points were deleted, and two paintings with main motifs not at the vanishing points. For each painting, we measured the gaze for 30 s. The number of participants analyzed was 18. We observed that viewers looked more at main motifs on vanishing points than at other regions. The same result was demonstrated even when the main motifs were deleted. We also observed that viewers looked more at the vanishing point than at the main motif, which is not on the vanishing point. This suggests that viewers enjoy the main motif by seeing it within peripheral visual field. In addition, viewers looked more at the vanishing point than at other regions even when there was no main motif originally. These results demonstrate the powerful effect of vanishing points.