Is Facial Beauty an Innate Response to the Leonardian Proportion?

The present study examines whether the facial proportion forehead length equals nose length equals lower face length (the “1/3-proportion”), which is considered a standard of facial beauty, arouses an innate aesthetic pattern of response. Profile deviations from the profile of Leonardo's famous drawing of Isabella D'Este as well as from other female profiles, which are based on the 1/3-proportion, were generated by increasing or decreasing the nose length. Profile evaluations as beautiful and as sexually appealing showed an inverted U-shaped function of the profile deviations when the profiles were presented upright; however these measures were flattened when the profiles were presented inverted. By contrast, profiles evaluated as interesting exhibited similar flattened curves in the upright and the inverted conditions. Furthermore, evaluations of non-facial stimuli (rectangles) did not behave similarly to evaluations of profiles. These results were interpreted as supporting the Aesthetical Construction theory, which suggests that the evaluations of these profiles are based on a response pattern constructed from innate and learned components.