ABSTRACT
Over millennia, artists have mastered how to exploit the visual form to capture motion’s vitality across a wide range of styles, including conceptual, abstract, and realistic artistic representations. In this chapter, we describe the history of movement representation in art and how implied motion cues can create the impression of dynamism. We discuss the antecedents to, and consequents of, movement appreciation and show that judgements of dynamism are linked to aesthetic judgements and are somewhat malleable, influenced by extraneous factors and context. We further describe the growing evidence contributing to our understanding of the neurobiological processes that underlie movement appreciation in different contexts and suggest that movement appreciation in visual art relies on a complex interplay between brain regions associated with perception and attention. However, the specifics of this relationship remain unclear, especially with respect to artworks that lack a depiction of the human form (such as landscapes or non-figurative abstract forms). Finally, we outline future goals and new avenues for the field, highlighting how research in the emerging domain of movement appreciation specifically, and neuroaesthetics more generally, will benefit from more inclusive, naturalistic, and robust methodological approaches to generate a holistic and complete understanding of the aesthetics of movement.
