These images show real eye-tracking data collected from viewers looking at paintings: heatmaps showing where attention pooled longest (red marking the areas nearly everyone looked at, cooling through orange and yellow down to the spots almost no one noticed), and occasionally scanpaths showing the actual order the eye moved from point to point. It’s a rare, direct way to check whether a composition’s intended hierarchy actually matches how people look at it. Most of what’s gathered here comes from Gurney Journey, illustrator James Gurney’s blog — one of the few places online that has run and documented this kind of experiment on paintings in any real depth. Worth a visit if you want to go deeper.
