John Onians

On Picturing a Candle: The Prehistory of Imagery Science

The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical – and even psychological – reckoning with imagery and its parent concept ‘imagination’. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination’s intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for – and presents challenges to – the scientific endeavor. We focus on the neuroscientific literature’s most commonly used task – imagining a concrete object – and, after sketching what is known of the neurobiological mechanisms involved, we examine the same basic act of imagining from the perspective of several key positions in the history of philosophy and psychology. We present positions that, firstly, contextualize and inform the neuroscientific account, and secondly, pose conceptual and methodological challenges to the scientific analysis of imagery. We conclude by reflecting on the intellectual history of visualization in the light of contemporary science, and the extent to which such science may resolve long-standing theoretical debates.

Art, the visual imagination and neuroscience: The Chauvet Cave, Mona Lisa's smile and Michelangelo's terribilitá

This paper considers several types of imagination relevant to art historical enquiry. These are exemplified in artistic expressions ranging from palaeolithic paintings in the Chauvet Cave, to drawings, sculptures and buildings designed by Michelangelo and drawings and paintings by Leonardo, and are related to recent neuroscientific discoveries. From this it emerges that important types of imagination cannot be understood without an appreciation of the neural processes that underlie them and especially without an acknowledgement of the importance of neurochemistry.

World art: Ways Forward, and a way to escape the ‘autonomy of culture’ delusion

Abstract The interest in art as a worldwide manifestation has grown significantly since the ‘World Art: Ways Forward’ conference in 2007. Many publications have appeared, important conferences have been arranged and an ambitious series of radio broadcasts presented by the Director of the British Museum. The most important conclusion to be drawn from these developments is that the study of art worldwide requires an acknowledgement of the limitations of a purely cultural approach. It is impossible to understand art worldwide without an appreciation of the influences of human nature and of the nature of the environment.

War, Mathematics, and Art in Ancient Greece

perfection was more the product of physical fear and the need to guarantee one’s security by the creation of the perfect warrior, warriors such as those shown on the frieze of the mausoleum of Halicarnassus c. 353 Bc. The elegant triangles and parallelograms of their bodies probably reflect the common influence of artistic schemata which derive from Polykleitus, and parade-ground poses developed in military training such as that recommended by Plato at the same period. Polykleitus’ tetragonot statues, like Pythagoras’ mathematikol and Plato’s geometretoi, are all contributions to the development of the perfect military male. The disciples whom Pythagoras and Plato sought in the gymnasia of Croton and Athens were not just learned in mathematics and geometry, they actually were ’mathematical’ and ’geometrical’. Like the Doryphorus, they were young men reduced as far as possible to mathematical constructs, ’wrought square’ by their teachers, as Simonides would have said.

The Eye's mind – Visual imagination, neuroscience and the humanities

This work was supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council through a Science in Culture Innovation Award: The Eyes Mind – a study of the neural basis of visual imagination and of its role in culture (Reference AH/M002756/1).

Art History and Memory, From the Couch to the Scanner: On How the New Art History Woke Up to a Neural Future

To look back over the last forty years of the journal is to be struck by the changes in intellectual climate and the successes and failures in meeting the goals of the original editorial vision. Most disappoiting is the neglect of neuroscience, which is particularly striking considering its earlier productive role in the principal tradition of art history. Most surprising is the way that postmodernism only slowly embraced it as a tool in spite of the fact that figures they most respected, such as Freud and Deleuze, were clear that any theory will be strengthened if based in neurobiology. Fortunately, though, there is now robust evidence that the climate is changing at both the individual and institutional level for reason that are exemplifies at the end of this essay.

The ‘masterpiece’: a social or neural phenomenon?

The article reconsiders current assumptions about the social framing of the concept of the masterpiece. By showing that one of the earliest masterpieces from the cave of Chauvet is principally the product of non-conscious neural processes, and especially neural plasticity and neural mirroring, and hardly influenced either by social context generally or by verbal exchanges in particular it opens a new approach to an old issue.

Reviews : Stephen Bann, The True Vine: on visual representation and the western tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. £35.00

academic practitioners of sociology are largely ignored. These positions do have more fundamental results. Adams seems to believe that there is a pure logic and an asocial objective science. These are obviously extremely contentious positions (as Adams knows). To my mind, he is too dismissive of post-Kuhnian studies of science, which are mentioned only extremely briefly through the work of Barnes on Kuhn, as it is here that some of the fundamental challenges to Adams’ positions could be found. In some respects this is even odder given his sympathetic comments on Wittgenstein in places. An engagement with, for example, David Bloor’s work on the Strong Programme and its Wittgensteinian inflections would have been welcome.