A book reveals how artistic beauty penetrates us: when we look at a painting we are not just seeing it but “completing it”. All our experience is activated by the perceived and the miracle happens
It happens to almost anyone who pauses in front of a work of art. Enter a room in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and there it is, the famous Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. The sky swirls, the stars pulsate and the world seems alive with feeling, as if the canvas reflected the mind itself. And then you feel a sudden calm, or a sweet melancholy, or a sense of disorientation that is difficult to explain. Nothing “happens” in the painting, just something inside you. What is this something? It is the question that has guided Eric Kandel throughout his life, neurobiologist, Nobel Prize winner for medicine in 2000 and one of the world-famous scientists most open to dialogue with the humanistic disciplines. After having revealed the molecular mechanisms of memory by studying a small marine mollusc, his interest shifted to this mysterious topic: what happens in the brain when we feel an emotion in front of a work of art?
The answer is in the collection of essays Art and science, a volume just published by Cortina publisher, an exciting journey into what could be considered the meeting point between the science of the mind and the poetry of the gaze. «The brain», says Kandel, «is not a simple camera, but a creative device that takes in information from the retina and completes it by drawing on the memory, experience and cultural patterns of that given individual». This means that when you look at a painting, you are not just seeing it, you are “completing” it. The brain compares what it perceives with what it knows, what it has experienced previously and what culture and memory have taught it. «Of an image we see, the retina only sends coded patterns of light and contrast, which are then broken down by certain visual areas into lines, edges and movement», says Kandel, simplifying as much as possible. “Higher cortical regions combine these fragments with memory and expectations, transforming visual stimulus into meaning.” The art historian Ernst Gombrich called it “the observer’s part”, that is, the indispensable contribution that the latter provides to any work of art. But for Kandel, Gombrich’s is not a metaphor, but a question of biology: “Each of us literally sees differently,” he adds, “because our brain has been shaped by different experiences.” In other words, in every work of art, we not only see the artist’s vision, but also our own. And so, moving with ease between science and philosophy, Kandel finds in Immanuel Kant the first great intuition that perception is not passive: the mind imposes its own categories – space, time, causality – on raw sensation, creating an ordered internal world. Neuroscience, he says, now confirms this idea in physical form: “The brain does not mirror the world… it reconstructs it.”
Kandel’s story could be the subject of a novel in itself. Born in Vienna in 1929 to a Jewish family, he was ten years old when Nazi Germany annexed Austria. His father’s toy store was confiscated and the family had to flee to the United States, taking with them little more than a few suitcases and memories of a vanished world. In Brooklyn, the young Kandel learned English, read voraciously, and became fascinated by what he later called “the biology of the beauty of the mind and its tragedy.” The phrase condenses his scientific and humanistic vision: the idea that the human mind – with all its sensitivity, creativity, and ability to produce quality – still arises from biology, which makes it prone to diseases and cognitive disorders. His Nobel Prize-winning research clarified how learning leaves a physical trace in the brain, a sort of tiny chemical strengthening of the connections between neurons. This simple and elegant discovery built a bridge between mind and matter, and led him to ask: if memory has a biological basis, could emotion have it too? In his book the argument is constructed with the precision of a scientist and the sensitivity of an art lover. For Kandel, emotion arises from the interaction between the limbic system (in particular the amygdala) and the prefrontal cortex, where feelings are generated, evaluated and connected to perception and memory.
In his famous 1959 work The Two Cultures, the British writer Charles P. Snow complained that intellectual life was divided into science on the one hand and the arts and humanities on the other. Kandel’s research is also a sort of response to Snow: a demonstration that the two cultures can meet in the study of the brain. That’s right. According to the Nobel Prize winner, art also studies this organ: from Monet’s sparkling water lilies to Cézanne’s fragmented landscapes and Picasso’s cubist portraits, modern artists have stripped the representation of objects, reducing it to essential elements so as to highlight how the mind organizes experience and which features of the world most activate certain emotions. In fact, as stated in the literal translation of the title of another of his books published in English, Reductionism in the art and science of the brain, for Kandel both art and science “reduce” complex phenomena into their simplest parts. In art, Kandel argues, «reducing» – as practiced by Cézanne, Mondrian or Rothko – means going to the essence of the visible world: shape, color, contours. Both the artist and the scientist, he states, “seek simplicity not for its own sake, but as a path to understanding complexity.” The scientist reduces to understand the neuron; the artist reduces to understand the emotion. And both, ultimately, investigate the same thing: the human mind. For Kandel the subject of a Cézanne painting is perception itself. “Modern art,” Kandel says, “reveals the creative process of perception – how the brain transforms the world into a personal experience.” This intuition reaches its culmination in the typical abstraction of modern art, the subject of the essays in the last part of Art and Science. In front of a Mark Rothko painting, we are no longer looking at the world. We are looking at the way we look. The painting becomes a mirror of the viewer’s mental and emotional life. This, for Kandel, is the deepest power of art.
Thus a painting is not just an object of beauty, but a laboratory for the self. The particular shapes and colors on the canvas are precisely those that activate the same circuits that govern emotion, memory and imagination. The feeling of amazement or sadness we feel when faced with art is not mystical but biological: the activation of ancient pathways that connect the visual cortex to the limbic system, where emotional value is assigned. The more a work of art activates these circuits, the more alive it seems to us. And because these circuits are shaped by our past, our culture, our memories, the experience of art is always personal. Two people can find themselves in front of the same painting and experience completely different sensations, and both be right precisely because “the work of art is co-created by the artist and the viewer”, notes Kandel. «We bring you our story of vision and feeling».
This, for Kandel, is the deepest power of art. Aesthetic pleasure, amazement, sadness: everything is the chemistry of the mind translated into meaning. Here’s what his book suggests. What art does is make us aware of these internal mechanisms, make us feel our brains thinking and feeling at the same time. Science can describe the mechanism; art allows us to experience it. And in that moment – in front of the glimmer of Monet’s water or the glow of Rothko’s color backgrounds – biology and beauty become the same thing. The canvas becomes a mirror not only of the world, but of the very organ that creates it: the human mind.
In the colours, in the shadows, in the empty spaces left on the canvas by Vincent van Gogh there is exactly what the artist has selected in an object to arouse certain emotions. There is the form of our consciousness: fragile, radiant, infinitely creative. This is for Kandel the most human discovery of all.
