Symmetry and Artistic Elongation of the Human Form: Exploring the Attainment of Aesthetic Appeal

Throughout history there has been the propensity in certain artworks for people to be depicted in an unrealistic and unnaturally elongated form. This form is typically associated with the Mannerist style of artworks of the Renaissance, exemplified by many of El Greco's Spanish paintings (Figure 1) and Italian works by Bronzino and others (see Olszewski, 1985). But artistic elongation of human beings has been observed throughout history, from rock art images discovered at various sites around the world and dating back several millennia (see Behn, 1998) to those images created by the near contemporary Modigliani, and even those featured in modern and sometimes image-manipulated advertising pictures. The elongation of human figures is seen in sculpture too, dating back from at least as long ago as the 4th century BC with the thin, elongated votive sculptures of the Etruscans, and as recently as the 20th century with Giacometti's similarly thin and elongated figures and Brancusi's sculptured heads.

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Figure 1.

El Greco, Laocoön, c.1610/1614. Samuel H. Kress Collection. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The features associated with the Mannerist and similar styles have been characterised by Bouleau: ‘The Mannerists taper their figures, depict them with long spindle legs and swan necks…for the sake of the charm, of the languorous grace which we in fact enjoy in these forms’ (Bouleau, 2014). Nevertheless, although very much rarer, horizontal distortion in artistic creations is seen too, examples ranging from the Ice Age sculpture of the Willendorf Woman to contemporary artworks of Fernando Botero. Thus distortions can be vertical or very occasionally horizontal, and self-evidently are not confined to depictions featuring the face with its frequent association with attractiveness. Yet what is aesthetically pleasing is however highly dynamic, a subject which has been explored together with discussion of the underlying cognitive mechanisms by Carbon (2011) amongst others.

Why have artists employed these unnatural forms of distortion? Although necessarily speculative, it is suggested here that by harnessing two underlying perceptual devices these artists have created artworks which over the centuries have often been found to be aesthetically pleasing and beautiful.

First, humans are essentially symmetrical, and the human body demonstrates reflectional symmetry which, compared to rotational and translational symmetry, has the greatest appeal (Friedenberg, 2018). Furthermore, numerous studies have shown that the greater the symmetry the more the stimulus is considered beautiful (Lindell & Mueller, 2011). This may well be because, as symmetry results in a greater degree of redundancy, the stimulus is less complex and thus easier to process (Lindell & Mueller, 2011), and — relevant to representation of humans — vertical rather than horizontal symmetry is easier to process (Reber et al., 2004).

Second, although of uncertain applicability to human body shapes, experimental studies using polygons of varying lengths have confirmed ‘longer shapes to be more beautiful’ (Friedenberg, 2017). Perhaps artists subconsciously exploit the peak shift effect, whereby they ‘not only capture the essence of something but also…amplify it in order to activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object’ (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999). Acknowledging the aesthetic preference for elongated shapes, here too this appears to be as a result of ease of visual processing: ‘If fast automatic processes like axis extraction are judged aesthetic as might be predicated according to processing fluency theory, then objects with prominent axes ought to be considered more beautiful’ (Friedenberg, 2017).

It appears both symmetry and the elongated form may be important factors which contribute to the aesthetic appeal of many Mannerist and similar artistic creations, and common to both factors is likely to be the ease with which images can be ‘processed’ by the brain. Thus Reber and colleagues suggested ‘that aesthetic pleasure is a function of the perceiver's processing dynamics: The more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive is their aesthetic response’ (Reber et al., 2004). Artworks which comprise not only symmetrical but elongated figurative components surely harness those factors which result in ease of processing and thus enhanced aesthetic appeal.

The neural correlates underpinning not only the appreciation of symmetry but also aesthetic judgements of beauty have been extensively investigated, mainly by means of functional MRI studies. Relevant here, however, are teasing out those brain regions activated when, using the same stimulus, individuals make aesthetic judgements when compared with those regions activated when subjects make evaluations of symmetry. In one such functional MRI study, the authors found that ‘when participants judged a pattern to be beautiful…not only areas dominant in aesthetic judgments, but also one area specifically engaged in symmetry judgments (left intraparietal sulcus) showed an enhanced BOLD [blood oxygenation level dependent; i.e. a measure of blood flow] signal’, leading to their conclusion that ‘in many participants, symmetry guides judgments of beauty’ (Jacobsen et al., 2006).

In conclusion, the aesthetic appeal which can be attained through those artworks depicting human figures which feature symmetry enhanced through elongation, or occasionally widening, appears to have an objective, neural basis — chiming with Semir Zeki's ‘somewhat unusual view that artists are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them, but studying unknowingly the brain and its organisation nevertheless’ (Zeki, 1999).