NEUROAESTHETICS: Is It Just Brains, Beauty, and Babel?

What do recent advances in biological knowledge mean for the traditional view of the human as a person? This chapter follows one thread of this discussion by examining how new research in Cognitive Neuroscience influences our understanding of visual art. I review the nascent field of neuroaesthetics and ask whether it is in any way new, whether it is relevant to the activities of art historians, and how this field is likely to develop. An important aim is to deliver recent research and conceptual developments to the community of art historians and critical theorists, so that they can begin to access the burgeoning Cognitive Neuroscience literature for themselves. Questions of natural vision in comparison with the visual content of art and the nature of expert judgment and its relation to connoisseurship are addressed. Finally, it is suggested that future productive and interesting developments will come out of focused, multidisciplinary collaborations.