During the 15th century, some theatrical plays featured a specific character, known as the festaiuolo, who acted as a mediator between the stage action and the audience. As stated by Michael Baxandall (1988), the pictorial figures that are “catching our eyes and pointing to the main action” were inspired by the festaiuolo and referred to a familiar, embodied experience for contemporary beholders.

Pointing gestures in painting appear to have a clear purpose in the image: they are meant to be followed by the viewer's eyes. What initially took the form of a simple and primordial structure - one figure indicating the main scene or a key element, progressively evolved into more complex deictic compositions. Between the Renaissance and the late 17th century, pointing gestures multiplied within pictorial space and assumed a variety of functions. In his Trattato della pittura Leonardo da Vinci referred to them as atti dimostrativi, emphasizing their usefulness not only for spatial but also for temporal references. In this sense, deictic signs became tools of internal visual organization, highlighting relationships among figures, symbolic attributes and chronological sequences within the narrative.

Art historical scholarship has long assumed that pointing gestures direct the beholder's gaze and attention in order to facilitate the understanding of the depicted content. However, this assumption has never been empirically tested. Nor does there exist a differentiated theory of deixis in painting, and little is know about  whether, to what extent and how deixis influences the beholder’s visual exploration of an image. 

The project addresses these gaps by employing eye tracking methods to measure the eye movements of beholders looking at paintings in which deixis plays a central role. We also conducted open interviews to  test the interpretation and the understanding of the artworks. Gaze patterns were compared across three experimental groups: art experts, lay persons, and Deaf fluent users of Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS).

The project investigated whether deictic signs significantly influence the beholder's gaze and, if so, how visual attention moves between deictic gestures and their targets, and how this process relates to interpretation. It further explored whether linguistic and cultural particularities of the beholders, such as fluency in sign language, affect the perception and understanding of narrative paintings. 

By addressing these questions, the study contributed to Art History by expanding its theoretical framework concerning pictorial deictic gestures. It clarified how the visual perception of hand signs intended to guide the gaze unfolds and how these signs shape the interpretation of paintings. More broadly, the project offered new insights into cultural and linguistic differences among art beholders and extended the fields of Gesture Studies and Cognitive Linguistics by revealing previously unexplored connections between living gestural cultures and pictorial traditions.
 

The project was led by art historian Temenuzhka Dimova, a specialist in hand gestures in Early Modern painting, and art historian Raphael Rosenberg, a pioneer in the application of eye tracking methods to art historical research (Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History, University of Vienna).