360 GRADI MAGAZINE January/February 2021

the ‘original artwork and the original
artwork for the control stimulus.
Therefore, a resonance and motor
simulation mechanism were found in
all of them, net of what they more or
less knew about the artistic quality of
the images.
The same
researchers have
replicated the same
results using the
works of an
exponent of abstract expressionism,
Franz Kline; in these works, the
dynamism is given by the materiality of
the brushstroke, by the dripping of the
color, by the dripping, by the trace left
by the brush. Kline’s works were shown
alternating with control stimuli in
which all these dynamic categories had
been removed, while maintaining the
Gestalt complexity of the stimulus.
Here too the simulation of the gesture
was detected, obviously this is not all
as what is in the experience, we feel in
front of these works is a common
element that we cannot pretend that it
does not exist if we want to speak in a
way holistic of what an aesthetic
experience is in front of an image.
I conclude by presenting a study,
again by the Gallese group, where, this
time, the expression of the face that
expresses pain was taken into account;
Six works from the Renaissance to the
Baroque were selected that expressed
alternating pain, in a random sequence,
with faces instead with a neutral
expression. Obviously, the real works
of art are not these but they are simply
the cut-out face; so, I don’t pretend
to argue that these experiments fully
explain why we like Caravaggio, as
Caravaggio is the whole work. As I
said earlier it seems literally that
we are looking through the keyhole,
here we focus on a particular aspect
of the work: the face, the part that
communicates an emotion, the pain.
They are all faces of martyrs alternating
with a face that shows no emotion.
We arrived at these 12 stimuli starting
from 100, shown to a very large sample
of people and those who all recognized
were chosen either as expressing pain
or as not expressing any emotion:
therefore, pain towards a neutral
stimulus.
I am interested in taking a step further
than what I have told you about so far;
so far, I have described an automatic
mechanism probably modulated by
many cultural factors of my personal
history that is activated when I put
myself in front of an image, in the
specific case that is activated when
that image is an image hanging on
the museum. I asked myself another
question, when after having seen and
emphasized with that image someone
asks me to give an explicit aesthetic
evaluation; for example, the question
may be: how artistically beautiful this
image looks to me and do I have to rate
it on a scale from 0 to 10.
When I express an aesthetic judgment,
according to many starting from
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