‘Salon Diagonale’ at Compton Verney Gallery

This study uses Lothar Götz’s room-scale mural Salon Diagonale as a testbed for empirical aesthetics across three contexts. In the physical gallery, visitors wore mobile eye-trackers while freely exploring the diagonal colour fields; fixation maps, viewing paths, and both absolute and area-normalised dwell times were analysed. A VR replica and online experiments extended the work under controlled manipulations of edge sharpness, palette, and layout (including a Gaussian-blur edge condition and a monochrome variant). Results show pronounced individual differences alongside robust tendencies—heightened attention at edges and vertices and a horizontal central bias. Online ratings indicated lower preference for blurred edges and a slight preference for the monochrome variant over the original, with heterogeneous justifications. A follow-up webcam-based eye-tracking test supported the feasibility of scalable online gaze research and found no linear relation between liking ratings and gaze count.