Customer Reviews

Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki

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Onians' new book quickly treats the insights of 25 men who wrote on art over the past 2000 years, with an emphasis on the details of perception that these figures noticed in the process of persistent observation of art and viewing. Onians corroborates and explains their insights in the light of the brain science that has emerged in the last two decades. This book is far more likely to instruct the reader in the history of art history than in the history of art. In the end Onians' goal is to foster curiosity and further discovery about the relationship between art and the brain and about human responses to art over the past 30,000 years. In this sweeping story there are cursory discussions of race, biology, genetics, culture, nature, optics, environment, and, obviously, neuroscience. I am not an expert in science or art but I think I will be little interested in the story of art if its history will be largely reduced to rods, cones, and some spastic pizazz at the crossroads between dendrite and axon. Onians does not forsake the humanistic tradition for the scientific but champions a new way forward in the history of art.

Visual arts (especially paintings, for they are basicly 2 dimensional the third dimention expressed by perspectival representation) contains two form of evaluation. One being cultural and seasonal that they chance , felt and evaluated differently by different cultures at different times. The other dimension is basical being the reception of the visual image by the brain unclauded by personal and cultural biases. This book gives the history of neurological basis of visual perception. I think it is of enormous value both to the historian
and neuroscientist. It is precise, condensed and focused to visual system.