ANDZREJ KRAUZEI had just finished reading Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch when Anjan Chatterjee’s article on how the brain reacts to art and beauty arrived in my inbox. Central to the novel’s fairly preposterous plot is a small oil painting of the same name done by a Dutch artist in 1654, and sprinkled throughout the book are thoughtful reflections on art and on why viewing paintings is so often such an emotional experience. Both the novel and Chatterjee’s article got me thinking about what kinds of artworks make me pause and consider them at length. Portraits are invariably my favorites. Neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel explained why that might be in his book The Age of Insight and in a 2013 New York Times op-ed piece, in which he wrote: “The brain’s representation of faces is especially important to the beholder’s response to portraiture. Our brain devotes more space to reading the details of faces than to any other object.”
In his feature, Chatterjee reviews the state of the young discipline of neuroaesthetics, with fascinating details about how brain injuries affect artists’ painting, as well as imaging results that track the functioning of an art viewer’s brain beyond the visual cortex. Reading this article will probably enhance your next museum visit.
Looking at art of a different sort has inspired some ecologists aiming to restore certain Earth ecosystems to an approximation of their prehuman biodiversity and balance. Pleistocene cave paintings depicting extinct megafauna offer insights about what kinds of modern-day species could repopulate abandoned agricultural lands, restoring such areas to a wilder, more “natural” landscape. In “Where the Wild Things Were,” Daniel Cossins reports on “rewilding” efforts in Europe and in the U.S., the controversy ...
