托福听力vermeer painting原文

托福听力vermeer painting原文
NARRATOR:Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class.
MALE PROFESSOR:As you know,uh,portrait artists often position their subjects so that their head is turned a little to one sidethereby presenting the artist with a semi-side view,uh a semi-profile view.
And for some reason,Western European artists have historically tended to show the left side of the subject's face more than the right.Uh,awhile back,some researchers examined about 1,500[fifteen hundred]portraits,painted from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in Western Europe,and in the majority of them,it's the left side of the face that's most prominently displayedWhy’s that?
And,interestingly enough,this tendency to show the left side has diminished over time,especially in the twentieth century.In fact,the left-right ratio is now about one to one,fifty percent left,fifty percent right.
Why’s that?
We do know that for many artists,the choice of left
side/right side was very important.There's an image by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gog h called The Potato Eatersthat
shows the profiles of a group of farmers.It's a
lithograph,which is a print made from images drawn on a stone.When you print something that way,what you get is a mirror image of the original picture-the exact same image,except that left and right are reversed.And van Gog h was so dissatisfied with the print that he wrote to his brother,quote,“the figures,I'm sorry to say,are now turned the wrong way,”end quote.
Anyway,why do you think so many painters in the past chose to depict the left side of their subject's face?Nancy?。