Portrait Profiles and the Notion of Agency

Abstract

Artists tend to draw portraits from an angle so that more of one side of the subject's face is depicted. The tendency to draw more of the left or right side of the face is influenced by gender, social, and personality characteristics of the subjects, and has changed over time. Several hypotheses have been advanced to account for these orientation biases, including effects of maternal imprinting, hemispheric specialization for emotional expression, hemispheric specialization for facial perception, and some form of symbolic communication. None of these hypotheses seem to account adequately for the range of observations reported thus far. I propose an agency hypothesis, which is based on the fact that right-handed subjects tend to conceptualize agents of actions to the left of where they conceptualize recipients of actions. This hypothesis emerged from studies on the interactions of language and space, and seems in accord with the art observations. The agency hypothesis suggests that remarkably simple spatial schemas influence several cognitive domains, including language and aesthetics.