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A Strange-face-in-the-mirror Illusion in Art Perception and Artistic Self-perception

In this paper I analyze the famous Courbet’s painting “The Desperate Man” from the perspective of cognitive studies and transdisciplinary field of “neuroaesthetics”, with special reference to the topic of visual perception during mirror gazing (Caputo 2010, 2012, 2014) related to the strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion. The image depicted by Courbet could have been a portrait of a drunken reveler coming home and seeing his own face in the mirror ; a self-portrait of a romantic artist coming home, seeing his reflection in the mirror and wanting others to see him “exactly as he was that night” – as a bohemian genius. Whatever he sees in the mirror he depicts as convincingly as possible, desperate in his attempt to show to the one that looks at the painting the effects of what he has seen while mirror gazing. What exactly is the state of mind of the man on the picture? To what extent and by what external and internal “forces” am I as an observer instigated to become “aware” of a particular quale, this time the quale of desperation? Is the meaning of the picture in the social consensus between my supposedly individual “quale” and Courbet supposedly individual instance of subjective, conscious experience frozen in time in the material of oil on canvas? What is the nature of “individuality” of a quale? How much constraint (biological and neurological, psychological and social is built in the socially consensual “individual state of mind”?

artistic self-perception, cognitive neuroscience of art, mirroring, neuroaesthetics, self-perception theory, self-representational models of consciousness, the strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion

This is an official video-paper by Sibila Petlevski presented at "Mirror, Mirror: Perceptions, Deceptions, and Reflections in Time" International Conference 9 March, 2019 at Birkbeck College, University of London organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research.This work has been supported by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project number IP-2014-09-6963.