Perhaps you have heard the expression, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It might be more accurate to say that beauty is in the mind of the beholder, or person doing the viewing. Humans have long thought about the nature of beauty. The philosopher Plato wrote about beauty and form in the mid-fourth century BC, so our curiosity about beauty is at least 2,500 years old. Artists from every century have tried to answer the question, "What is beauty?" With new technology that allows scientists to learn more about the brain, we can learn more about what makes art beautiful.
Have you ever looked at a painting of lines and dots and thought, "I could do that"? What makes simple lines and shapes art? It probably lies in the way our brain looks at visual images. In the 1950s, two scientists, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, received the Nobel Prize for a series of experiments that showed how the brain "sees" things. They found that the cells of the brain "saw" lines and angles much better than circles, and that they noticed contrast, like black and white, much more than brightness.
While those in the science community will credit the Nobel Prize winners with the findings, it's actually artists that seem to have had an instinct about how the brain works long before Hubel and Wiesel's experiments. Take a look at Piet Mondrian's paintings. They are all lines, angles, and bright colors. He created this style of painting decades before scientists realized that the brain saw these things best. Or, think about Pablo Picasso's later paintings. He exaggerates certain features—a nose here, an eye there—and although the painting doesn’t look exactly like the model, you recognize what it is immediately. How is this possible?
V. S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist and director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, thinks he can explain Picasso's success. He compares Picasso's paintings to something that happens in nature. There is a certain kind of bird that has a red dot on its beak. When baby birds see the mother bird's beak, they peck at it, begging for food. However, if you paint a red dot on a stick, or even better, three red dots on a stick, the baby birds will peck even more—their response is even more intense. They are seeing one important detail and using it to make meaning of what they see. This is what we as viewers do when we see a painting like Picasso's, where some details are exaggerated and others missing entirely. Just like the baby birds, we can still recognize the whole from a few details.
Great artists have a talent not only for drawing but also for unlocking the puzzles of the brain. Just as Mondrian somehow knew he could reduce images to lines and angles, and Picasso sensed he could exaggerate details, Leonardo da Vinci must have had an instinct about how people looked at things for the first time. The painting of Mona Lisa is a good example. When you first look at a person, or a painting of a person, you look at the eyes. When you look at Mona Lisa's eyes, you see her mouth only outside of your line of vision, and she looks like she's smiling. When you look directly at her mouth, it doesn't look like she's smiling anymore.
Mondrian, Picasso, and da Vinci are all examples of artists who seemed to understand how vision works. Paul Cezanne, on the other hand, stumbled upon something about how our thinking works. Our brains are more interested when they have a problem to solve. Cezanne's later paintings make viewers solve the problem of missing information. A single blue line might represent a river, a green smudge a tree. People are attracted to the paintings essentially because their brains fill in the missing information.
Semir Zeki is a scientist in England who is looking at the parts of the brain that are working when we see beautiful things. In one study, he looked at images of people's brains when they viewed things they described as beautiful or ugly. When they looked at the beautiful things, the part of the brain involved with emotion and reward was active. When they looked at the ugly things, the part of the brain involved with wanting to get away or escape was active. He's also discovered that brain cells are only active or excited when they see certain views of a face—something great portrait painters seem to have sensed.
As scientists learn more about the brain, we may gain a stronger understanding of how great artists inspire us.