Insights on Sight

Abstract

An emphasis on the biological foundations of vision, visual perception and aesthetics is a recent development in art history. At the 2009 meeting of the British Association of Art History in Manchester several sessions took inspiration from the biological sciences, or more precisely, the cognitive neurosciences. At the spearhead of this movement calling on the humanities to accept the brain’s ‘material realities’ are well-established scholars such Barbara Stafford and David Freedberg.1 Both urge their peers to seize on the new and, as they regard it, exciting neuroscientific discoveries that illuminate the cognitive underpinnings of all sorts of cultural objects, including the visual perception of art in history. Stafford and Freedberg understand the exchange between the humanities and neuroscience as one in which these fields fruitfully learn from one another. However, most of their neuroscientist colleagues engaged in the study of vision are far less keen to engage in time-consuming interdisciplinary debates. The reluctance of Semir Zeki and Vilajanur S. Ramachandran, the two most prominent champions of the newly-founded discipline of neuro-aesthetics, to take historical expertise seriously is easy to understand: they believe they have found the key that unlocks all the mysteries of visual perception in the past and present.2 Our apparatus for vision is lodged in the brain, they argue, as proven by investigations into the evolutionary development of this wondrous organ. Unlike the vague and nebulous explanations of philosophers and historians about vision, their scientific work has the advantage (so Ramachandran claims) that it can be experimentally tested. Ergo, knowledge of the neurosciences and its experimental methods (mainly on rats!) is the basic tool for all those working on the history of art, vision and visual perception. From cave art to Damien Hirst, the story of how the brain’s deep structures developed to support human survival will provide the definitive answer to artistic creativity and its perception throughout history.