Experiencing Pictorial Artworks: The Role of Intersubjectivity

Within the field of aesthetics, recent approaches have stressed the fundamental contribution of intersubjective and relational processes in experiencing art. According to these views, aesthetic experience is not only a complex intra-individual phenomenon characterized by a peculiar weaving of perceptive, emotional, and cognitive processes, but also an intersubjective enterprise. These approaches inherently differ from each other in the conception of intersubjectivity that they adopt. Whereas the cognitive approach (Freeman, 1995) stresses the intrinsically communicative nature of art and the importance of an intentional intellectual involvement with the artwork to appreciate it, the embodied approach (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007) strongly highlights the precognitive empathetic relation with artwork that, by means of embodied simulation, emotionally engages the observer.