Exploring Facial Expressions in Pietà and Nativity Paintings Throughout Time

This study explores the development of depicting facial expressions in historical paintings representing pivotal religious scenes: the Nativity (Birth of Christ) and the Pietà (Death of Christ). By examining artworks spanning the 11th to the 19th century, we assess how depictions evolve over time in terms of polarity, agreeability, and ambiguity of individual faces, and compared these with the perceived emotional intensity of the overall pictorial scene. A total of 56 paintings were randomly selected to be evaluated by 150 participants. Each participant categorised all visible faces into one of ten emotion categories – ranging from joy and love to sadness and anger – and then rated the painting’s overall emotional intensity. We quantified the degree of viewer agreement (agreeability), calculated a polarity measure (positive versus negative emotion balance) and ambiguity (amount of chosen categories) at the face level. We also measured how participants perceived each painting’s emotional intensity. Results showed that Pietà paintings were generally rated as both more emotionally intense and more uniform in their expressions than Nativity artworks. Moreover, Nativity paintings exhibited a gradual rise in their polarity over time, whereas Pietà scenes did not display a clear temporal trend. Furthermore, we found a clear relation between creation year and ambiguity in facial expression, but not with agreeability. The emotional intensity of the overall paintings also increased with the creation year. Together, these findings suggest empirical evidence for a historical change in the depiction of facial expression.