The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

by Iain McGilchrist

In 1973, Chris McManus and Nick Humphrey had already published in Nature the results of a study of approximately 1,400 Western portrait paintings from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, showing that there is a tendency during this period, also, for the sitter to be portrayed looking to the viewer’s left.6 These findings have since been confirmed by others.7 The implication appears to be that the focus of interest comes to lie in the viewer’s left visual field (preferentially subserved by the right hemisphere), at the same time that the more emotionally expressive left hemiface of the subject (controlled by the subject’s right hemisphere) is exposed to view. The strength of Hufschmidt’s research, apart from the enormous scale of his undertaking, is his inclusion of the ancient world. This reveals a distinct shift towards favouring the right hemisphere in the appreciation of representations of the human face from the sixth century BC onwards.