The Museum as a Spatial System: Bodily Movement, Visual Comparison and Memory in Art Viewing

Art viewing in museums inherently relies on physical movement through galleries. While research has begun to examine movement in art perception, it has focused mainly on abstract paintings and small-scale case studies. We investigated how bodily movement, gaze behaviour and memory interact with a mobile-eye-tracking study in Vienna's Leopold Museum (145 visitors viewing 66 paintings across six rooms). The results show that a) although visitors increased their viewing distance for larger paintings, they did not maintain a constant visual angle, b) visitors repositioned themselves mainly laterally in front of paintings, and c) they frequently compared neighbouring artworks by repeating gazes between paintings. Longer viewing times and repeated returns to a painting were associated with better subsequent memory. These findings suggest that the museum's "white cube" is not a neutral backdrop for independent encounters but a spatially organised environment that shapes horizontal exploration as well as visual comparison between adjacent works.