Motoric Understanding and Aesthetic Appreciation

Standard philosophical studies on picture perception usually investigated the peculiar nature of pictorial experience and the way aesthetic appreciation can be generated during this experience. Recently, however, the philosophical literature has also focused on a new aspect of picture perception: the possible involvement that the visual states related to action processing may actually play in pictorial experience. But this role has been studied only in relation to the understanding of the nature of pictorial experience, qua visual experience. This paper offers some preliminar speculation, which may guide future research, on the role of action in aesthetic appreciation of pictures.

The Iconography of the Sublime

This chapter sets out to describe the establishment of the iconography of the sublime by focusing on three central motifs: the shipwreck, the hostility of mountain summits, and the volcano eruption. I first analyze a shipwreck painting by Joseph Vernet in relation to Denis Diderot’s writings and the particularities of the picture’s exhibition at the Paris Academy Salon. Then, the Alpine landscapes of the Swiss painter Caspar Wolf and their oscillation between academic traditions, vedute painting conventions, sublime imagery, and geological accuracy is analyzed by example of the painting Lower Grindelwald Glacier with Lightning. The motif of the volcano eruption is addressed through a group of paintings, whose interplay makes visible a variety of complications inherent to the sublime. The discussed artworks depicting the three motifs feature intrinsic – that is stylistic and formal – innovations that seek to intensify the pictorial experience of their sublime content matters.

Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm

Painting, drawings, and engravings are frequently described as rhythmic, or as possessing rhythmic features, but it is far from clear how such observations are to be understood. The central problem here is that rhythm is standardly recognized to be an inherently temporal phenomenon: rhythmic structure or organization unfolds in time. If rhythm is essentially durational, how can a static configuration of marks and lines be rhythmic? Chapter 19 defends the view that although the experience of viewing a picture takes place in time, and thus is successive, it cannot be temporally structured in a sufficiently determinate manner to sustain the attentional focus required for the communication of even simple rhythmic patterns. With reference to examples of both representational and abstract art, and to recent empirical research, the author argues that graphic art is non-sequential and that this has important consequences for picture perception.

Attention and the Subject of Depiction Some Remarks on Husserl’s Approach to the Function of Attention in Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Pictorial Experience

This study aims at exposing the phenomenological description of attention as presented by Husserl in his 1904-05 Göttingen-lecture Principal Parts of the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge, in its relevance for the study of so-called “intuitive re-presentations”, that is, phantasy and image-consciousness. Starting with the exposition of the fundamental traits of the intentional theory of attention, this study discusses the definition of attention in the terms of meaning [Meinen] and interest, which allows it to become an encompassing modification of all kinds of lived experiences that does not imply an alteration of their act-character (Husserl, 2004: 73). We refer to this character of attention as “plasticity”. In what follows, the study underlines these two definitions of attention and their importance for the understanding of phantasy and image-consciousness. Both kinds of re-presentations will be described stressing the role of attention in the “structuring” of the intentional act and in its affective basis. Finally, the study deals more specifically with the complex description of image consciousness from the viewpoint of the attentional meaning of the image subject.