Is beauty in the brain of the beholder?

Have you ever considered why one object of art moved you in its beauty whilst you found another to be unspeakably ugly? And how a sculpture from hundreds of years ago could still be considered beautiful, even after centuries of changing tastes and fashions have relentlessly modified what is considered aesthetically pleasing?
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Have you ever considered why one object of art moved you in its beauty whilst you found another to be unspeakably ugly? And how a sculpture from hundreds of years ago could still be considered beautiful, even after centuries of changing tastes and fashions have relentlessly modified what is considered aesthetically pleasing?

Well, a kind group of Italian scientists have recently attempted to solve these very mysteries by scanning the brains of people observing sculptures to see which areas of the brain responded to art. The scientists aimed to test whether there was truly a ‘golden ratio’ of perfect proportion and symmetry in art by presenting participants with images of statues which adhered to the golden ratio and slightly skewed versions of the same statue which did not.

In this way they aimed to answer an age old question and discover whether aesthetic appreciation was objective, based upon abstract values or formulas, or subjective, that is, based on the viewer’s previous experience and established tastes.

The experiment proved that statues adhering to the ‘golden ratio’ elicited a particular neural emotional response (the activation of specific sets of cortical neurons and the insula) which the skewed ‘ugly’ statues did not. A response which was particularly prevalent when participants were required to give a spontaneous reaction to the statues ‘as if they were in a museum’. This finding, they claim, indicates that there may be some truth in objectivist formulas for perfect proportion and beauty which have been bandied about since Plato’s time.

The ‘golden ratio’, has fascinated everyone from mathematicians to artists and architects for centuries. The formula, which involves calculating ‘golden rectangles’ of perfect proportion which can then be applied art works, has been used to explain the beauty of creative feats from classical monuments such as the acropolis to Le Corbusier’s modernist skyscrapers and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to Dali’s surrealist masterpieces. The ‘Golden Ratio’ has even been adopted by Stephen Lanzalotta, a baker, who claims you can lose weight by basing you diet on the formula.

Yet, before all the artists rush off to buy a ruler, calculator and a copy of The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown was heavily influenced by the theory when writing his novel), the Italian researchers in Italy also found that a second process was involved in the appreciation of beauty.

Although the perfectly ‘golden’ proportioned statues activated specific parts of the brain which the ugly statues didn’t, the experiment proved that a second neurological reaction always came into play where the sense of beauty was concerned. This was the stimulation of the amygdala, the part of the brain which stores emotional experience and thus allows one to make a subjective judgement on what we are presented with.

So, sadly the puzzles of whether appreciation of whether appreciation of art is an objective or subjective process have not been solved as yet, instead we must be content in the knowledge that deciding what is beautiful, or what is not, is a complex mental process dependent on taste, fashion, experience and, it seems, mysterious ‘golden rectangles’.

Read the full report, The Golden Beauty: Brain Response to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures, by Cinzia Di Dio, Emiliano Macaluso and Giacomo Rizzolatti, by clicking here.

Serena Sharp
About the Author
Serena Sharp is at Goldsmiths studying Media and Modern Literature.