New study suggests the brain applies different standards of beauty to paintings and architecture

A recent study published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts provides evidence that the human brain applies different standards of beauty depending on the type of visual art it evaluates. By comparing the visual properties of historical building facades and artistic paintings, scientists found that architects and painters weigh aesthetic features like symmetry and complexity quite differently.

When people look at an image, their appreciation of its beauty relies on several visual variables. These variables include properties such as color, balance, symmetry, complexity, and the relationship between the main subject and its background. Psychological theories of visual perception propose that humans tend to prefer sensory properties that the brain can process easily.

“I have been interested in the Valuation System of the brain, the network that learns and deploys values for decision-making,” said Norberto Grzywacz, a professor of psychology at Loyola University Chicago. “In particular, I have had interests in aesthetic values, which this system also processes. At some point, I asked myself whether aesthetic values in a sensory domain, for example vision, are universal or specific to different domains.”

The Valuation System relies on different neural circuits to determine our preferences. “Recent studies have shown that a specific network of the brain, namely, the Valuation System, decides our preferences about things in the world,” Grzywacz said. “This network works for different sensory modalities, for example, vision, audition, gustation, and olfaction.”

Gustation and olfaction refer to the senses of taste and smell. “So, we know that aesthetic values for each of these modalities have different places of storage,” Grzywacz said. “But I was surprised that even inside one modality, namely, vision, different values are stored separately for different domains. Our study found that aesthetic values depend on domain, being different for art and architecture.”

Current computational models of how people learn aesthetic values treat these rules as universal. This means the models assume the brain uses the exact same visual criteria to evaluate a painting as it does to evaluate a sculpture or a building. Simple observation suggests this universal approach might not be entirely accurate.

For instance, a building that looks unbalanced might evoke a sense of discomfort because it looks like it could tip over. An architect planning a building exterior might want to maximize the appearance of balance to provide a sense of stability to the public. In contrast, an artist painting a picture might intentionally use an unbalanced composition to create a sense of movement or drama.

To test whether aesthetic values are tied to specific categories, scientists compared the visual statistics of architecture and artistic paintings. Making this comparison fair is challenging because buildings are often limited by physical materials, construction costs, and structural rules. To address this, the authors focused on a specific time and place characterized by immense artistic and architectural freedom. They chose the period of Haussmann’s Renovation of Paris, which took place from 1853 to 1870.

During this renovation, architects were given nearly unlimited budgets to redesign the French city. At the exact same time, France was experiencing a period of massive artistic production. Many renowned painters from various art movements were actively working in the area. This overlapping period allowed the scientists to study the artistic choices made by both architects and painters when they were free from major financial or structural restrictions.

The researchers gathered photographs of residential building facades constructed in Paris during the Haussmann renovation. They photographed the buildings under similar lighting conditions and angles. After removing images with perspective distortions or obstructions like trees, they ended up with a final sample of 55 architectural images.

For the artistic comparison, the scientists collected 142 photographs of paintings from 61 different artists. These paintings were housed in the Louvre and Orsay museum collections. To ensure an accurate historical match, all the selected paintings were completed between 1853 and 1870 by French artists or artists who spent most of their careers in France.

The authors then used a computer program to analyze specific visual properties across both groups of images. They measured three types of visual complexity, looking at differences in light intensity, spatial arrangement, and color variation. Complexity in this context refers to the mathematical amount of visual information contained within an image.

The scientists also calculated the degree of balance and symmetry in each image. To do this, the computer compared the distribution of light and dark areas on the left and right sides of the pictures. The program then evaluated the images for repeating spatial patterns, known as periodicity.

Additional measures included the distribution of visual orientations, looking at whether horizontal and vertical lines dominated the images. The scientists also measured the ratio of foreground to background spaces and the dominant color hues present in the works. They then ran statistical tests to compare the data from the buildings with the data from the paintings.

The data provided evidence for measurable differences in how aesthetic variables were applied in the two domains. Buildings tended to have significantly higher levels of visual complexity than the paintings. While it might seem intuitive that a painting would be more complex than a wall with windows, the buildings actually contained more distinct variations in light and spatial boundaries. The similar skin tones and blended backgrounds in many paintings actually lowered their mathematical complexity.

The residential facades also displayed a much higher degree of balance and symmetry. The visual weight in the architectural photos was distributed evenly across the center. The artistic paintings showed far more imbalance, as artists frequently grouped light or detailed subjects to one side of the canvas.

The buildings also demonstrated a strong tendency toward repeating patterns, showing high spatial periodicity, while artists rarely included such strict repeating patterns in their works. Similarly, the architectural images showed a heavy bias toward strict vertical and horizontal lines. The paintings contained far more varied orientations, such as tilted lines to indicate movement.

The researchers found that the buildings had distinct divisions between background walls and foreground elements like windows. In the paintings, the boundaries between subjects and backgrounds were less defined. The scientists also looked at whether the materials or artistic movements influenced these visual statistics.

They categorized the paintings by medium, such as oil or watercolor, and by art style, such as Impressionism or Romanticism. For the most part, the medium and the style had almost no effect on the measured aesthetic values. One exception was that Impressionist paintings showed a measurable increase in color complexity.

Paintings from the Barbizon School, a realism movement focused on landscape art, showed a decrease in color complexity. Interestingly, both the buildings and the paintings shared a preference for warm, orange tones. The authors suggest this might stem from a general human preference for calming earth colors. The buildings also showed a high degree of visual harmony with one another, likely due to a requirement to use local cream colored limestone.

“When we say that something is beautiful, the context of what we are seeing matters,” Grzywacz said.

However, a potential limitation of this study involves its reliance on analyzing final products rather than directly testing human observers.

“We have asked whether artists and architects of the same period use the same aesthetic values in their craft,” Grzywacz noted. “These results are not the most direct way to probe whether the brain has separate aesthetic values for art and architecture. Answering this question directly would require working with a sample of participants.”

Another limitation involves the study’s reliance on a single historical period and geographic location. The strong visual differences between the buildings and the paintings might be influenced by the specific cultural context of nineteenth century Paris. Looking at other historical eras, such as the Renaissance or the Baroque period, might yield different statistical patterns.

“We are tackling different problems related to values, often using aesthetic in our experiments and modeling,” Grzywacz said. “Four examples are: 1. What makes different people (including identical twins) have different values? 2. How do aesthetic values for people with mental-health problems differ from people without these conditions? 3. What effects does AI have on the distribution of values in a society? 4. Why values get socially polarized?”

“Einstein once wrote, ‘The more I read, the more puzzled I was by the order of the universe and the disorder of the human mind,’” Grzywacz said. “Einstein had all the right to be puzzled about how the human mind appears to be disordered. But the more we study it, we find that the disorder arises from mechanisms that make sense. They adjust each person as well as possible to their individual contexts.”

The study, “Domain-Specific Aesthetic Values: A Comparison of Paintings and Architecture,” was authored by Norberto M. Grzywacz, Consuelo M. Correa, and Ivan Correa-Herran.