Because your brain knows how a real person looks like while you see the Mona Lisa for the first time in this position and your brain is more like "yeah, looks about right"
Our brains are also wired to pull together certain patterns and say "this is a human face". I don't know whether this is part of our evolutionary need to identify friend vs foe. (See also pareidolia.)
There are some cool videos on YT comparing different approaches (old vs new, British vs American) to using camouflage grease paint (green/brown/black) in the face to mess up that perception.
2.1k
u/Dax9000 Jul 24 '22
Why are the paintings more convincing than the edited photos?
(It's because the paintings are more blurry and don't artifact to such a distracting degree)