Neuroarthistory

This provocative book offers a fascinating account of one of the newest and most exciting fields in the human sciences: neuroarthistory. In recent decades there has been a dramatic increase in both the quantity and the quality of our knowledge about the brain, especially the visual brain. The number of art historians making use of the new neuroscience is growing and the insights they gain by doing so are compelling. Knowledge of phenomena such as neural plasticity and neural mirroring is making it possible to answer with a new level of precision some of the most challenging questions about both the creative process and the response to art. This is equally true whether their framing is positivist or postmodernist. John Onians devotes each of his twenty-five chapters to a specific writer, or "neural subject", each of whom recognised that the mind was a part of human nature. As the neural basis of the mind became more and more apparent, they became clearer about how an understanding of that neural basis could contribute to an understanding of all human behaviours, including art. The level of agreement among major thinkers such as Montesquieu, Burke, Kant, Marx and Freud, and leading art historians such as Pliny, Winckelmann, Ruskin, Pater, Taine, Wolfflin, Riegl, Gombrich and Baxandall, not to mention artists such as Alberti and Leonardo and scientists such as Aristotle at the beginning and Zeki at the end of the twenty-five centuries covered in the book, is startling. So, too, is the extent to which their penetrating observations match the findings of modern neuroscience. Anyone wondering whether to making use of neuroscience themselves should read this book. It will change most readers' view not only of the history of art history, but of the history of art itself – and even of the history of culture.