The sender was not an obscure religious cult but a company selling photocopiers

The sender was not an obscure religious cult, but a company selling photocopiers.Some 17.5 per cent are financial in nature – debt collection services and the like. Lists containing 100,000, 300,000 and a staggering 1.5 million business contacts have been offered to this small business – all useless for its needs.
Other products and services form the subject of a further 27 per cent. Nearly half – 45 per cent – relate to electronic equipment and services: computers, web sites, mobile telephones and databases. Sir: Over the past few months, we have saved unsolicited faxes we have received, rather than binning them as normal We now have 177 sheets of yellowing paper.

Therefore, his sitter, facing him, is illuminated from the sitter’s right. In consequence, in those (mostly male) portraits with the sitter turning left, the bridge of the nose is emphasised by a strong shadow while the nose of a (woman) sitter turning to her right is more softly defined.JOHN NASHWivenhoe, Essex.. When a woman was portrayed it was usually because she was somebody’s wife.A man portrayed on his own might face left or right. But is was established as early as 1434, when Jan van Eyck painted the so-called Arnolfini double portrait, now in the National Gallery, that the wife is shown on her husband’s left hand. So, even when on separate canvases, the portrait of the wife is painted to hang to the right (as seen by the viewer) of that of the man. Each turns to face the other; it would look very odd if they did not.A further detail: a right-handed painter would choose to have the light coming over his left shoulder, so that his working hand did not cast a shadow over the area he was painting.

During my thirty years as a professional art historian, this or a very similar story has been published about once a decade, which is about long enough a new generation of scientists to think it has hit on something novel and for a new generation of journalists to decide it’s a headline story for the silly season. They ignore the far greater significance of social traditions and craft skills.
The overwhelmingly majority of portraits were painted in Europe in oils between 1420, when the necessary skills had been developed, and 1900, when they had been largely superseded by photography.Most were commissioned by powerful and arrogant men. Sir: You report that researchers from the University of Melbourne offer a psychological hypothesis to explain why most women in portraits turn the left cheek towards the viewer, while with portraits of men the reverse is the case (“Science reveals why women turn the other cheek”, 4 August). Come on, Ken, surely you know that the real reason dictators don’t like to introduce democracy is that they might lose power.CHARLES KENNAUGHGreasby, Merseyside.