Memory in Art: History and the Neuroscience of Response

At the center of this chapter stands a historical work of art, one of the great masterpieces of fifteenth-century Flemish painting, Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross. It raises issues that relate to many other his-torical and contemporary artworks. Like almost all visual images, it poses a large number of difficult questions about the nature and varieties of memory.' My current work on the neural bases of empathy and the relationship between emotional and felt motor responses to works of visual art suggests some new ways of thinking about memory, and about the relationship between... Mehr ...