The Psychology of Visual Art Eye, Brain and Art

Introduction

The previous chapter concluded that aesthetic preference is tied, at least in part, to utility or affordance. If the human aesthetic sense did evolve as part of a reward system for satisfying certain biologically important needs, then it must be closely linked to visual features in the natural environment. Humans evolved not to function in the environment of modern civilisation, which emerged only in the last few thousand years, but in the environment of the Pleistocene era. For two million years humans existed and evolved as Pleistocene hunter–gatherers. Survival depended on foraging for edible plants and hunting animals. It was a relatively mobile, nomadic existence that relied upon the resources available in the local environment. Bands of hunter–gatherers perpetually moved on to new locations with the changing seasons and with the depletion of local resources. The first point of enquiry in the search for the natural origin of visual aesthetics is this ancient environment. Perhaps the demands of this ancestral lifestyle still drive our aesthetic preferences. The artist Henri Matisse remarked that ‘art imitates nature’. The mimetic theory of art described in Chapter 1 views art as an idealised imitation of nature, a distilled essence of natural aesthetic beauty. To what extent does aesthetic appreciation of art spring from judgements about ancient natural forms? This chapter considers the question from the viewpoint of modern research on landscape preference and visual statistics.