Recommended readings

For more details about research on facial beauty, see Cunningham et al. (1995).

To read more about the 'prospect and refuge' theory of landscape beauty, see Appleton (1996).

Semir Zeki discusses Clive Bell's notion of 'significant form' from the perspective of neuroscience in Zeki (2013).

The article about International Art English by Alix Rule and David Levine has become a book, available here.

A more general discussion about the interaction between sensory and decision factors in perception can be found in Chapter 7 of Mather (2014a).

Van Meegeren's career as a forger of works by Vermeer is told by Wynne (2006). You can find out more about van Meegeren here, and in this BBC programme.

The definition of connoisseurship given in the text is taken from Bellingham (2012).

A neuroscientific study of authenticity judgements (described in the text) was reported in Huang et al. (2011). The Guardian newspaper reported the dispute among connoisseurs about Titian's Danae.

Research comparing gallery viewing of original artworks against viewing reproductions in a laboratory is reported in Brieber et al. (2015), Gruner et al. (2019),Locher and Dolese (2004),and Locher et al. (2001). The quote from Robert Hughes about reproductions of artworks was taken from Hughes (1990), a collection of thoughtful essays on art and artists by a celebrated art critic.

MacDonald and Morovic (1995) compared the colour gamut of reproductions against original artworks in the National Gallery London.

Sublimity is discussed by Keltner and Haidt (2003). Research on the effects of size on art judgements is reported in Pelowski et al. (2017) and in Seidel and Prinz (2018).

Sex as a factor in art auction sales is studied by McMillan (2019). Nochlin's (1971) essay on women in art raised questions about sexism in the art world that are still relevant today. Recent research is reported in Adams et al. (2017), Goldin and Rouse (2000) and MacNell et al. (2015).


Additional material

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