Abstract
<p>Portrait paintings provide a useful case study for vision research because they simultaneously evoke judgments of the depicted person’s attractiveness and the painting’s beauty. We examined whether shared visual information and individual aesthetic orientations jointly shape impressions of portrait paintings. In a web-based experiment, 621 Japanese adults rated 100 portraits (50 male and 50 female) on attractiveness of the depicted person, beauty of the painting, abstract–figurative appearance, emotional arousal, and masculinity–femininity. We quantified inter-rater agreement with Mean Minus One (MM1), and explored candidate directed dependencies among impressions and individual differences with the linear non-Gaussian acyclic model (LiNGAM). Beauty showed higher agreement than attractiveness, whereas emotional arousal showed the lowest agreement, supporting a distinction between shared pictorial criteria and viewer-dependent affective responses. Attractiveness and beauty were strongly correlated but differed in the exploratory directional structure. In male portraits, attractiveness emerged as a candidate predictor of beauty; in female portraits, beauty and emotional arousal emerged as candidate predictors of attractiveness. Individual aesthetic traits were linked to final evaluations through masculinity–femininity and emotional arousal. These results suggest that portrait perception combines shared visual constraints with individual aesthetic filters and that portrait sex modulates the balance between face-based, pictorial, and affective processing.</p>