Et Facta Est Lux: Experiencing Luminosity in Art and in the Real World

The experience of light determined some of the most intriguing cultural universals, yet it is an underrepresented problem in vision sciences. In their attempt to represent cultural universals, artists adopted empirical solutions to the representation of light sources. We believe that such graphic solutions are showcases of visual indexes related to the phenomenology of light, and therefore they already constitute a level of explanation for luminosity perception. This claim is supported by psychophysical experiments on the ‘glare effect’, an illusion that generates a vivid impression of self-luminosity only by means of quasi-linear luminance ramps. Recent studies show that a similar illusion can be obtained in absence of physically continuous luminance ramps. Results from several experiments suggest that: 1) the key features for luminosity perception lie within the photo-geometric structure of the proximal stimulus; 2) the processes involved in luminosity perception are intrinsically different from those involved in surface color perception.