It is just ten years since Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist from London University, published his Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). It was a small book, animated by a big idea: that recently established neurological facts about vision could go a long way toward explaining how the visual arts work. He suggested, for example, that artists interested in motion tend to paint with a more restricted palette than artists who focus on immobility, and that this tendency arises from the fact that perceptions of color, form, and motion are registered in different parts of the brain. And he proposed that such findings could be brought together to constitute a new scientific discipline, for which he coined the name “neuro-esthetics.”

Zeki was confident that artists would applaud the project of neuroesthetics; indeed he suggested that many of them deserved to be treated as honorary members of the neurological community: whether they realized it not, he said, they had always “experimented upon . . . the organisation of the visual brain . . . by working and re-working a painting until it achieves a desirable effect, until it pleases them, which is the same thing as saying that it pleases their brains” (2–3).

But if Zeki was sanguine about the reception of neuroesthetics among painters, he was not so optimistic about critics and art historians. To such denizens of “the world of art,” he said, any appeal to natural science was likely to seem “strange and even dangerous,” a philistine attempt to substitute “general statements” about the brain for their own vaunted sensitivity to “ambiguity” or other so-called “subtleties of art” (216). There is one art historian, however, who has managed to overcome this resistance to science: after a distinguished career specializing in classical art and the Italian Renaissance, the British scholar John Onians has recently embraced the neuroesthetic research program, and, despite his mild and quiet manner, he seems determined to turn himself into what might be called Zeki’s bulldog.

Onians has come to believe that the age of art history is over: recent attempts to retell the story of Western art, or to extend its methods to non-Western or minority traditions, and all that fidgeting with the idea of “modernity,” and the fabled victories of “theory,” and the self-proclaimed radicalism of “the new art history” were not really the beginnings of something new, according to him, but the last gasp of the discredited old traditions of snobbish Eurocentric connoisseurship. In a pair of imposing works—The Atlas of World Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Art, Culture and Nature: From Art History to World Art Studies (London: Pindar Press, 2006)—Onians has sketched the outlines of a “new natural history of art,” rooted in neuroscience and offering an impartial survey of human artistic activity around the globe over the last 30,000 years.

Onians’s latest book is meant as a handy manifesto for the natural-scientific approach to art history, or what he now calls “neuroarthistory,” and it culminates in a chapter extolling the virtues of Zeki as opposed to the died-in-the-wool “art-experts” who, as Onians puts it, are inclined to “blame him for dealing in cold scientific terms with a warm human topic” (202). Onians himself does his best not to frighten his implied audience of conservative art experts; when it comes to specific experiments in neuroesthetics, indeed, he provides only one example. Back in 1999, a professional artist and an amateur were both set the task of copying the same portrait, while scanners recorded the patterns of activity in their brains. The experiment revealed a great neuronal detonation in the visual cortex at the back of the head of the amateur, whereas in the case of the professional, the neuronal action took place in the association cortex at the top and the front. This demonstrates, according to Onians, that the professional did not have to look so hard as the amateur, because “he was able immediately to access networks already built up . . . and so to draw on a greater existing reservoir of knowledge” (167).

Onians describes this result as “very exciting,” but even the most sympathetic readers may not be quite persuaded. (We will also wonder why, if this is meant to be a serious scientific experiment, there is no mention of any attempt to replicate it.) The suggestion that looking and copying are more habitual to professional artists than to amateurs seems banal rather than surprising, and we could surely be forgiven for suspecting that the references to their location in “neural networks” simply serve to add an aura of scientificity to a tawdry commonplace: where else, we might ask, should we expect the effects of artistic training to be laid down?

It is hard not to feel a little disappointed with the rest of the book too. Instead of invoking some new and unexpected intellectual perspectives that might be opened up by “neuroarthistory,” Onians has chosen to work through a selection of important personalities in the history and theory of the arts, noting how each of them has, in one way or another, “anticipated” the newly discovered science of “neural plasticity.” We start with Aristotle, who, it is suggested, came “close to a modern scientific point of view” (27) and could indeed be regarded as “a founder of neuroarthistory” (21); we are also told, in what might seem a flight of fantasy rather than an exercise in scientific rigor, that a series of peculiarly variegated childhood experiences in Macedonia was responsible for shaping Aristotle’s “neural apparatus” (29) into an instrument capable of stealing a march on Zeki’s neuroesthetics by a margin of more than two thousand years. Onians goes on to offer a rapid tour of two dozen other thinkers—from Pliny the Elder, Leonardo da Vinci, William Hogarth, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Marx, to E. H. Gombrich and Michael Baxandall—giving each of them an average of seven pages in which we learn how, in various degrees, they foreshadowed the gospel of neuroarthistory, and how their capacity to do so was determined by the experiences that molded their neural networks when young. None of us can fail to be exhilarated by such a parade of great intellects, and charmed and instructed by Onians’s commentary on them; but we are unlikely to get to the end without a melancholy feeling that the entire exercise has misfired: for if the conclusions of neuroarthistory have been so comprehensively adumbrated by the thinkers of the past, it is hard to see what the old tradition stands to learn from the supposedly fresh discoveries of neuroarthistory.

Two hundred years ago, the intellectual world was seduced by the idea of a science of “phrenology,” through which hitherto fuzzy descriptions of human mental capacities were to be rendered scientific by being linked definitively to the shapes and dimensions of individual skulls. In retrospect it is clear that the allegedly physical basis of phrenology was a shadowy world of pseudo-scientific fantasies that offered no real support for the psychological categories that were supposed to arise from it; and for all that Onians says in this book, there is reason to fear that the same fate may eventually engulf neuroesthetics and neuroarthistory.

There is another problem too. It is certainly feasible to imagine a history of human vision based on modern experimental neuroscience: an explanation of the different visual worlds of, say, forest dwellers and desert nomads, or of hunters and agriculturalists, and perhaps of the different things that they have found visually pleasing, both as individuals and as groups. But a history of vision and visual pleasure will never amount to a history of the visual arts, any more than a history of hearing and noise will constitute a history of the arts of music, or a history of the body a history of the arts of dance. From the point of view of neurology and of natural science in general, the phenomena of art are not going to be more than a tiny speck in the field of human experience as a whole. Activities like identifying flora and fauna, or driving cars, or looking out for friends in a crowd are going to play a much bigger role in a history of visual experience than the production or consumption of works of visual art.

Artistic pleasures, you might say, are not like low-hanging fruit, waiting there to be scoffed and enjoyed: they call for judgment and critical argument too. There would be no such thing as art in a culture that had no use for a distinction between good art and bad, any more than there could be science in a world that sees no difference between good and bad science. Art does not exist for people who are not prepared to defend their preferences as genuine, discriminating, insightful, or even true, as opposed to kitschy, derivative, facile, sentimental, phony, or insincere. Zeki himself has recently suggested that many artistic value judgments—including those promulgated by the most prestigious critics and historians—are liable to be discredited once we have access to what he calls “knowledge of which paintings were actually liked or disliked” based on scanning the brains of people who have looked at them (see, Tim Adams, “Neuroaesthetics,” Modern Painters [April 2009]: 31). But you do not have to be a pale and woolly minded aesthete with an aversion to natural science to recognize that art is about norms as well as facts, and that the critical question of what we ought to like or dislike cannot be reduced to the empirical question of what gets our cerebral juices flowing.

If neuroarthistory has a future, then it needs to keep clear of Zeki’s suggestion that artistic judgment and critical debate will in due course be replaced by empirical neuroesthetics. Art history is always going to be both more and less than neuroarthistory: more because it involves norms as well as facts, and less because it covers only a small segment of the spectrum of visual experience. If the apostles of neuroarthistory are to prevent it from going the same way as phrenology, they would do well to heed what Ludwig Wittgenstein once said about popular science (see, “A Lecture on Ethics,” 1929, in James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, eds, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, 1912–51, New York: Hackett, 1993, 37): that you need to be on your guard against anything that is “intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand, and to gratify . . . one of the lowest desires of modern people: namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science.”