Although estimates of how much time museum visitors spend looking at works of art vary, experts say their gaze rarely exceeds half a minute. Artists have long recognized that they need to grab viewers’ attention and entice them to linger.

In her just-published book, “The Lingering Look: Discovering the Unexpected in Art,” Marcia Hall, who lived in Chestnut Hill for 60 years before recently relocating to the Hill at Whitemarsh in Lafayette Hill, closely examines dozens of works of art by world-renowned artists from Botticelli to Henri Matisse to Georgia O’Keeffe.

”I have published a number of scholarly books,” Hall told the Local recently, but she wrote “The Lingering Look,” because “I wanted to write a book for people, not specialists but for people who enjoy art, have traveled, go to museums, etc.” She worked on the book for six years.

Hall, who grew up in Manhattan and in Washington, D.C., graduated from Wellesley College in 1960 with a degree in art history and earned a doctorate from Harvard University in art history in 1967. She taught art history, specifically the Italian Renaissance, at Temple University from 1973 to 2025. She is the Laura H. Carnell Professor Emerita of Renaissance Art at the Tyler School of Art at Temple.

For many people, great art is as indecipherable as quantum mechanics. However, Hall makes it accessible with the book’s straightforward explanations of why some works of art still have an impact on viewers centuries after they were painted. In the chapter, “The Female Body,” Hall writes about Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ famous 1814 female nude painting, “La Grande Odalisque.” Ingres ”renders optical reality with accuracy, but his subjects, such as this one, are fantasies,” Hall writes.

“Notorious for anatomical distortions such as we find here, his figures nevertheless transfix us with their physical presence,” Hall continues. “His immobilized odalisque looks languidly past us, avoiding our eye yet pulling us into her realm with the sensuous appeal of her flesh and fabrics, and with glorious color. Against a dark neutral background that disappears, she is set in a nest of brilliant blue, paler blue and dark and copper browns that echo her flesh. The exotic features of her turban, the peacock feather fan and opium pipe are highlighted with touches of dull orange-red.”

If we assume that the audience for eroticized nudes is exclusively male, we might be surprised to learn from Hall that many women were complicit in the creation of reclining nude or seminude images. For example, Pauline Borghese, one of Napoléon’s sisters, married Camillo Borghese, who commissioned Antonio Canova’s famous marble statue, “Venus Victrix” (Borghese Gallery, Rome, 1808). When asked if she had sat for her nude portrait, Pauline Borghese did not confirm exactly or deny, “but she is said to have remarked that Canova’s studio was well heated.”

“Madame Récamier famously had herself painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1800 (Louvre, Paris), but she is said to have preferred the more sensual version of herself by François Gérard (Carnavalet Museum, Paris, 1805),” Hall said.

What is the best decision Hall ever made? “To have a career in art history AND have a family,” she said.

Hall married the dean of Wellesley’s Chapel, Charles Arthur Mann Hall (1924-1990) in 1961, and received her master’s degree from Radcliffe College the following year. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1963 to research her dissertation on the late-16th-century renovations to Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, two of the most historic churches in Florence, Italy. Santa Croce holds the monumental tombs of Italian luminaries such as Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli.

Who are the artists, past and/or present, whom she admires the most? Hall listed “Raphael, Titian, Bruegel, Alice Neel and Magritte.”

What is the best advice Hall has ever received? “It was from my mother. She survived the Great Depression, so she said, ‘Equip yourself to do something, dear.’”

In addition to editing the series “Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance” (Cambridge University Press, 2005-2017), Hall has been awarded three National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, two Fulbright fellowships and fellowships in residence at the Villa I Tatti, Center for the Advanced Study of Art in Washington, D. C., and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

In 1993, Temple University awarded her the Creative Achievement Award, which recognizes outstanding creative work that is considered to have national and/or international significance. She has served as a visiting professor in the graduate program of Williams College at the Clark Art Institute and as visiting lecturer at University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware.

For more information about “The Lingering Look,” visit yalebooks.yale.edu. Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.