Feeling again the Emotions of Art, between ‘Motions of the Soul’ and Embodied Simulation

Abstract

The brain mechanisms underlying the kinesthetic and empathic involvement aroused by works of art have been experimentally demonstrated in recent times by neuroscience. However, since the classical age, artists were aware of the empathic power of art and, especially since the fifteenth century, they have made it a focal point of treatises and artistic practice. The central role attributed to the body in motion is also found in the recourse to acting as a creative practice in many artists of the time. The centrality of the body both of the artist in creating and of the observer, is here related to the ‘motor paradigm’ of neuroscience, from which it emerges that «it is with the body (not only with the brain) and its capacity for movement and action that we think and know». The experimentation of Embodied simulation is placed in this context, that is an even more ‘embodied’ way of looking at and ‘feeling’ art with the body.