"THE perpetrator in the centre of the picture has created some sort of disturbance," said Captain Joe Downing of the New York Police Department. "The people on his left appear to be involved in the disturbance, those on the right I would say are witnesses."

The hardened cop was not describing the scene of a New York street crime before a jury but The Purification of the Temple, by El Greco, at The Frick Collection art museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Amy Herman devised the course to help medical students to improve their observational skills during diagnosis. Learning to look at every inch of a scene and to describe only its contents, not what its contents may mean, is essential to learning objectivity, she said.