ABSTRACT
For long human beings were believed to see only with their eyes, that an image of the world was imprinted on the retina to be then transmitted and interpreted by the brain. With the intense recent research, it was understood that in the eye there is no image in the traditional sense. The retina is the filter and the channel of signals to the brain, which then builds the visual world. Vision is, therefore, an active process. Why do we like a painting or a sculpture? What do the portraits of Vermeer and Van Gogh’s sunflowers have in common? The mystery of art and beauty has a thousand interpretations, the most recent being from neuroscience. Semir Zeki, a professor of neurobiology at the University College of London, one of the leading experts on the mechanisms of human vision, is the pioneer. Its fundamental premise lies in the fact that all human activity is a result of brain activity and obeys the laws of the brain. For this reason, only by understanding the neural basis of creativity and artistic experience can we develop a valid aesthetic theory. Since the creation of a work of art requires motor activity (think of a musician playing or a painter painting), to what extent the fact that we like it or not is related to the movements that make artist during creation? The starting hypothesis calls into question the famous “mirror neurons”, those that are activated when an individual acts but also when an individual observes the same action performed by another.
