We sometimes fall in front of the beauty of a reflection on a lake, a face or even a painting. What happens at the cerebral level at this precise moment? A new discipline, the neuro-aesthetics, is closely interested in the subject of beauty. A big question still remains in this area. Does the appreciation of beauty depends on objective parameters present in the object of our contemplation or is it determined by purely subjective judgments?
Plato, defender of the first hypothesis, proposed that beauty depends on the intrinsic properties of an object which provides pleasant experience to the person who observes it. Human beings would therefore be equipped with brain processes allowing them to resonate with certain physical parameters present in the object of their admiration. Conversely, the second proposal suggests that the evaluation of a spectator is completely subjective and is only determined by his past experiences and his personal value judgment. If this was the case, any work of art, in theory, could arouse the same pleasure.
Now, when it comes to aesthetic judgment, it is a magic number that has been talked about a lot, it is the golden number. Noted most often φ, this approximate value of 1.618 would correspond to a ratio (about 3/2), considered to be perfect, between the length and the height of a shape that would put our brain in turmoil.
A number that crossed the times
The history of this concept is difficult to trace. It would seem that he has already been mentioned in Antiquity, but it was especially during the Renaissance that an Italian Franciscan monk, Luca Pacioli, puts him in the spotlight and attributes a “divine” character to him. During the 19th e and XX th century, artists will be interested in this golden number and scientists will even look for it in works of art, Natural scenes or faces that we find particularly harmonious.
The interest of neuro-imagery studies is that they allow today to verify whether a form having this magic ratio active our visual brain areas in a specific way. This is exactly what Giacomo RizzoLti and his colleagues at the University of Parma and Rome tested in 2007. These authors have been able to show that when we judge a work of art, we activate two systems, one located in Insula, sensitive to the golden number and therefore to the intrinsic characteristics of the work, and the other, Located in the amygdal, which seems rather to meet subjective judgment criteria and our past experiences.
You have 32.57% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.