Grand Spectra by Richard Anuszkiewicz is available for viewing at The Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, New York. This piece of art is a has six by six rows of different colored boxes. They are perfectly symmetrical boxes, that have a perfect center point in the middle of the middle four boxes. The furthest four corners are the deepest color in the painting. The corners are red, and as you move to the top middle, the color from box to box turns more and more orange. This is symmetrical from all of the corners around the outside edge. The center four boxes are the lightest color in the painting. They are yellow, around them are orange, then darker orange, then back to the red corners. The pattern is very symmetrical, and it brings the eyeball of the viewer to the center of the painting, no matter where you started to look at it.
In comparison, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is also extremely symmetrical. In The Last Supper, there is also a six by six box formation on the ceiling. The symmetrical theme continues with the panels on the walls, having two on each side. The three windows in the back are symmetrical if you cut the middle window in half. There are thirteen people in this painting. There are two groups of three on each side of a lone middle figure. This is also symmetrical in numbers from one side of the dinner table to the other. All of the symmetrical patterns force the eyeball to the middle of the painting, on the person in the center of the middle window, who happens to be Jesus. The Last Supper and Grand Spectra both pull the viewer’s eyes into the center by making everything symmetrical around the center. Leonardo Da Vinci and Richard Anuszkiewicz had this plan as they created their work of art. Although Da Vinci’s painting had a lone figure to be focused on, and Anuszkiewicz the center of four boxes, they both achieved manipulating the viewer’s eyes to end in the middle point.
