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Les causeries sur l'art sont presque inutiles.1 -Paul Cezanne
More often than not, [people] expect a painting to speak to them in terms other than visual, preferably in words, whereas when a painting or a sculpture needs to be supplemented and explained by words it means either that it has not fulfilled its function or that the public is deprived of vision.2 -Naum Gabo
I.
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT ART, but not in relation to the visual brain-through which all art, whether in conception or in execution or in appreciation, is expressed. A great deal, though perhaps not as much, has been written about the visual brain, but little in relation to one of its major products, art. It is therefore hardly surprising that the connection between the functions of art and the functions of the visual brain has not been made. The reason for this omission lies in a conception of vision and the visual process that was largely dictated by simple but powerful facts, derived from anatomy and pathology. These facts spoke in favor of one conclusion to which neurologists were ineluctably driven, and that conclusion inhibited them, as well as art historians and critics, from asking the single most important question about vision that one can ask: Why do we see at all? It is the answer to that question that immediately reveals a parallel between the functions of art and the functions of the brain, and indeed ineluctably drives us to another conclusion-that the overall function of art is an extension of the function of the brain. In that definition are the germs of a theory of art that has solid biological foundations and that unites the views of modern neurobiologists with those of Plato, Michaelangelo, Mondrian, Cezanne, Matisse, and many other artists.
The concept of the functions of the visual brain inherited by modern neurobiologists was based on facts derived between 1860 and 1970. Chief among these was the demonstration by the Swedish neuropathologist Salomon Henschen and his successors in Japan and England that the retina of the eye is not diffusely connected to the whole brain, or even to half the brain, but only to a well-defined and circumscribed part of the cerebral cortex. First called...