摘要：

An observer's aesthetic experience with a painting and his or her resulting emotional and evaluative responses to it depend on a complex dynamic interaction among characteristics of the painting, the observer and the physical, social and historical contexts in which the experience takes place (see Jacobsen, 2006; Locher, 2012). This chapter focuses on one of these factors, namely, on a painting's visual features and pictorial composition as the physical input to the processes that underlie an aesthetic experience with art, that is, it focuses on a painting as a visual stimulus. The purpose of the chapter is reflected in Wassily Kandinsky's statement that when one is going to scientifically dissect art, "The first unavoidable question is, naturally, the question of the art elements, which are the building materials of works of art" (1979, p. 20). His view is that "the analysis of art elements forms a bridge to the inner pulsation of a work of art" (p. 17). To achieve its purpose this chapter presents an overview of the findings of relatively recent empirical studies designed to identify what counts as the salient features of paintings and the contribution of these perceivable artistic qualities to an aesthetic experience. Additionally, this review discusses factors, such as a painting's title, frame and reproduction format, that are not part of an artwork's composition per se but have been shown to be potentially relevant to observers' perceptual and affective aesthetic responses to a painting. The paintings used as stimuli in the studies described are drawn from the Western canon and cover a wide range of artistic styles and pictorial content. Because a comprehensive review of the research findings available for each painting element discussed is not possible given the space allocated for this chapter, the findings described for a given pictorial element should not be taken as either exhaustive or definitive. Furthermore, to maximize the credibility and persuasiveness of the findings included in this review to scholars in the field of aesthetics as well as to art professionals, only studies that used real paintings or their reproductions as stimuli are included to the exclusion of research that employed non-art or art-like stimuli such as randomly generated polygons, dot patterns and single-feature displays. There is, however, a potential downside to the approach taken in this chapter voiced by some aesthetic science researchers that must be acknowledged.

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