Casopra canvas Breath of Light between two velvet armchairs in an olive green library

Perception · 2 min read

The Mona Lisa Effect: Do Painted Eyes Really Follow You?

May 2025

Listen to this story2 min

Walk past some portraits and their eyes seem to follow you around the room. It is called the Mona Lisa effect. In 2019, two scientists checked, and found that it doesn't work with the Mona Lisa.

A real illusion

The “Mona Lisa effect” is the impression that the eyes of the person in a picture follow you as you move.1 It is real, and there is a simple way to understand it. If a painted face looks straight out of the canvas, it keeps looking “straight out” wherever you stand, because the picture is flat and doesn't turn with you.

So when you step to the side, the eyes still seem aimed at you. Your brain reads that as being followed.

Frans Hals, portrait of Paulus Verschuur, 1643, looking straight at the viewer
Frans Hals, Paulus Verschuur, 1643: his gaze meets yours. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Archer M. Huntington. Public domain.
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503–19. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The experiment

At Bielefeld University in Germany, Gernot Horstmann and Sebastian Loth asked 24 people to look at the Mona Lisa on a computer screen. A folding ruler was placed between them and the screen, at several distances, and they had to say where on the ruler her gaze landed.1

To be thorough, the researchers showed 15 different crops of the portrait, from the whole head down to just the eyes and nose.1

“The effect itself is undeniable and demonstrable.”

Sebastian Loth, Bielefeld University, 2019

In other words, the effect exists, just not in the painting that gave it its name. Horstmann put it bluntly: the term “Mona Lisa effect” is a misnomer.1

For more on the most famous portrait in the world, read why the Mona Lisa is so small, and the story of the day it disappeared.

Casopra canvas Quiet Strength VIII at eye level in a long corridor seen at an angle
In the photo: Quiet Strength VIII, a Casopra canvas.

Using it at home

A portrait that looks straight out works like a host: it greets you from anywhere in the room. That makes it ideal at the end of a corridor, facing an entrance, or above a desk.

A face looking away has the opposite effect: calmer, more private. It suits a bedroom or a reading corner.

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Faces that look back

Four portraits with a gaze of their own.

Iron Grace, a canvas by Casopra

Iron Grace
Whispers of Care, a canvas by Casopra

Whispers of Care
Quiet Grip II, a canvas by Casopra

Quiet Grip II
Azure Wake, a canvas by Casopra

Azure Wake

See faces and bodies

La Maison Casopra

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Notes & sources
  1. Bielefeld University, press release on ScienceDaily, 8 January 2019, on Gernot Horstmann and Sebastian Loth, "The Mona Lisa Illusion—Scientists See Her Looking at Them Though She Isn't", i-Perception, 2019. sciencedaily.com
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