Ne sometimes come to a standstill before the beauty of a reflection on a lake, of a face or even of a painting. What is happening in the brain at this precise moment? A new discipline, neuro-aesthetics, takes a close interest in the subject of beauty. A big question still remains in this area. Does the appreciation of beauty depend on objective parameters present in the object? of our contemplation or is it determined by purely subjective judgments?
Plato, defender of the first hypothesis, proposed that beauty depends on the intrinsic properties of an object that provide a pleasant experience for the person who observes it. Human beings would therefore be equipped with processes at the cerebral level allowing them to enter into resonance with certain physical parameters present in the object of their admiration. Conversely, the second proposition suggests that a viewer’s evaluation is totally subjective and is determined only by past experiences and personal value judgment. If that were the case, any work of art, in theory, could elicit the same pleasure.
However, when it comes to aesthetic judgment, there is a magic number that has been talked about a lot, it is the golden ratio. Most often noted as φ, this approximate value of 1.618 would correspond to a ratio (about 3/2), considered perfect, between the length and height of a shape that would thrill our brains.
A number that has crossed the ages
The history of this concept is difficult to trace. It would seem that it was already evoked in Antiquity, but it was especially during the Renaissance that an Italian Franciscan monk, Luca Pacioli, honored it and attributed to it a ” divine “. During the 19the and 20e century, artists will be interested in this golden number and scientists will even look for it in works of art, natural scenes or faces that we find particularly harmonious.
The interest of neuroimaging studies is that they now make it possible to verify whether a form possessing this magic ratio activates our cerebral visual areas in a specific way. This is exactly what Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues from the universities of Parma and Rome tested in 2007. These authors were able to show that when we judge a work of art, we activate two systems, one located in the insula, sensitive to the golden ratio and therefore to the intrinsic characteristics of the work, and the other, located in the amygdala, which seems rather to respond to subjective judgment criteria and our past experiences.
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