Venus Effect

The Venus effect is a phenomenon in the psychology of perception, named after paintings such as Diego Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, Titian's Venus with a Mirror, and Veronese's Venus with a Mirror, in which the goddess Venus is shown gazing into a mirror. It was identified in 2003 by the psychologist Marco Bertamini. A viewer of such a painting has the strong impression that Venus is admiring her own reflection, yet the viewer actually sees Venus's face in the mirror from a position that is not directly behind her, so what Venus would actually see in that same mirror cannot be the same as what the viewer sees; a more accurate conclusion would be that Venus is looking at the reflection of the viewer, or, in the original setting of the painting, at the reflection of the painter. The effect illustrates that people commonly hold beliefs about how mirrors work that are inconsistent with the way mirrors actually behave, an area of study known as naive or intuitive physics, and it is often exploited deliberately in film, where an actor is positioned so that the audience sees an image in a mirror that looks convincing on screen even though it does not match what the actor themselves would actually see. Although the effect is named for a depiction of a woman, Bertamini and colleagues have shown that it is not specific to human subjects, that it generalizes to photographs and to real life settings with an actual mirror in a room, and that it can even appear in a depiction of an animal seemingly looking at its own reflection, as with the unicorn shown in the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries.