Cover Contemplating a masterpiece is a much more cerebral activity than we might commonly imagine (Photo: Getty Images)
Contemplating a masterpiece is a much more cerebral activity than we might commonly imagine (Photo: Getty Images)
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Ahead of World Art Day on April 15, we look at why some are left unmoved by the artworks of Artemisia Gentileschi or Claude Monet, while others feel overwhelmed with emotion
We all have our preferences when it comes to art. Some people are left unmoved by a work of art by Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi or Impressionist artist Claude Monet, while others might feel overwhelmed with emotion. Neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), USA, have found an explanation for this surprising phenomenon.
They explain in a study, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, that we form an opinion about an artwork after analysing it from different perspectives. Our brains pay attention to some basic characteristics such as the colours or texture of a work of art, but also to more complex elements such as the style. They evaluate each of these criteria individually before making an overall judgment about a given painting, sculpture or installation.
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To reach this conclusion, the scientists asked six volunteers to look at up to 1,000 paintings while their brains were scanned with a functional MRI scanner. These images were then fed into a machine learning algorithm, along with each participant’s ratings of the paintings they saw, and data from a neural network trained to analyse paintings based on various criteria (colour contrast, style, and so on).
The research team found that several brain areas are involved in forming an opinion about a work of art. Not surprisingly, these include the occipital lobe, the area of the brain that processes visual information, but also the prefrontal cortex. The latter plays an important role in emotions and decision-making. “When you see a picture, you decide immediately if you like it or not, but if you think about it, this is really complicated because the input is very complex”, says lead author Kiyohito Iigaya, formerly of Caltech and now with Columbia University, in a news release.
In other words, contemplating a masterpiece is a much more cerebral activity than we might imagine. However, the Caltech researchers say that more scientific work is needed to try to unravel the mystery of our aesthetic appreciation. And for good reason, since they did not take into account the influence of social and cultural factors on the construction of our taste for art.
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