Awe

De Hooch’s paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch citizens of Delft, usually women, cooking, doing laundry, petting dogs, sweeping, holding infants, picking lice out of children’s hair, breastfeeding, or admiring a glass of ale, changed how I see the world. Susanne Langer, our guide to aesthetic awe, offered a hypothesis for how:

It may be through manipulation of his created elements that he discovers new possibilities of feeling, strange moods, perhaps greater concentrations of passion than his own temperament could ever produce, or than his fortunes have yet called forth.

Seeing de Hooch allowed me to discover “new possibilities of feeling.” I sensed a mathematics of moral beauty in a mother’s glance at a child. I could feel from his painting the vast forces that unite us when moving in unison while doing laundry or being touched by morning light. Though I felt alienated most of the time at age fifteen, I too would experience sublime community over a beer with friends someday. De Hooch opened my eyes to the idea of everyday awe.

In 2019, I returned to Paris. I visited the Louvre and made my way past the endless line of selfie-taking Mona Lisa viewers and found myself in room 837. Once again, awe overtook me, this time in front of de Hooch’s La Buveuse

from 1658. In this painting, a man standing near a table pours a young woman a drink. She receives it with relaxed asymmetry, extending her legs in repose. Her face is awash in a coy smile, her eyes looking out toward what is possible. A man across the table looks off into the distance while smoking a pipe. An elderly woman standing nearby touches her chest.

How might I describe how this painting made me feel awe? And why? The concepts and language I might use fail to fully capture the intuitive, holistic processes visual art engages to move us to awe. Our language-based theories of how our minds work don’t often succeed in explaining how our minds actually work, for so many layers of the mind’s operations occur prior to the stories and explanations we offer with language. Neuroscience is helpful in capturing more subconscious processes. Within the study of the brain, neuroaesthetics—which attempts to explain how our brain responds to art—highlights four ways that visual art moves us to feel awe.

Think about the last time you encountered a piece of visual art that made you feel awe, perhaps a painting, or a photograph, or a temple’s patterned carvings or cathedral’s vaulted apses and stained-glass windows, or a climactic scene in a movie. As you look at the source of visual awe, neurochemical signals move from your retinas to the visual cortex in the back of the brain, which begins to construct the rudiments of images out of the angles of lines, patterns of light and dark, early signs of shape, texture, and color. In this first stage of perception, art reveals visual patterns we may not be aware of in the moment, and this can initiate feelings of awe—the human geometry of the eyes and mouth of the face of a homeless drifter, patterns of light and shadow on the facade of a building in a city, or, in de Hooch’s paintings, villagers moving in unison, going humbly about their daily affairs.

These neurochemical signals will next activate regions of the brain that store your ideas

about objects. Through visual techniques, the artist can prompt us to ponder notions and concepts; for example, our relation to the wonders of life. The embracing light that touches the four figures in La Buveuse might trigger thoughts about the power of the warmth of the sun or how time endlessly passes as the light shifts across the day.

This neurochemical representation of visual art next activates networks of neurons, for example in the anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, which stir your body (e.g., heart, lungs, muscle groups, and immune system). In this moment, visual art can evoke the direct embodied experience of awe, all from standing in front of a two-dimensional painting or photo, often hundreds of years old.

Finally, the neurochemical signals arrive in the prefrontal cortex, where we ascribe meaning

to the piece of art, with our words, concepts, learned interpretations, stories, and cultural theories about social living. Visual art can provoke us to reimagine reality. It can open us up to new ideas about who we can be and what our collective lives might be, in terms of our sexual identities, for example, and forms of social organization. My experience of awe in viewing de Hooch’s painting when I was fifteen years old gave rise to an idea in my mind, a radical one for me at that time in my life: the possibility of experiencing everyday awe.

In good art, there are so many opportunities to reach the highest part of the soul.

Sacred Geometries