Vision is mobile insofar as the eyes constantly, restlessly change their direction, redirecting their acuity within the visual field to cause an image to fall in the fovea of each eye, the tiny central area of maximum optical acuity under conditions of bright illumination. The eyes move in preprogrammed ballistic jumps, called saccades, turning toward stimuli glimpsed in parafoveal and peripheral vision. This means that an artist like Bonnard can plant stimuli of varying visibility around his painting to create coercive effectively automatic fixation choices, and thus tease the beholder from one stimulus to the next, directing the formation of what is known as a scanpath.
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