A Neuroarthistory of The Painters of Modern Life

Embodying Baudelairean Modernity

Lauren S. Weingarden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780429808708
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Using a transdisciplinary method combining art history, literary studies, and neuroaesthetics, this book examines the modern urban experience of nineteenth-century Paris through language and images of fragmentation and transformation.

The volume includes new empirical research conducted in collaboration with neuropsychologists, which tracks present-day viewers' physical and psychological responses to nineteenth-century painting and photography, thus providing data to model an experiential aesthetic for Baudelairean modernity. Weingarden reframes our understanding of Haussmannization, the demolition and rebuilding of the city into a modern metropolis, as witnessed by nineteenth-century Parisians, while also shedding new light on writers' responses, particularly those of Charles Baudelaire, and of visual artists like Édouard Manet, who contemplated and theorized this modernity and its impact. Using a unique word-and-image methodology, the author illustrates the development of ironic parody as a pictorial device that represents the rupture, fragmentation, and transmutation experienced by the artists and their viewers, revealing how art historians can utilize nineteenth-century neuropsychological practices and current neuroscience methods to reconstruct the lived, embodied experiences of nineteenth-century Paris.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars working in art history, modern art, urban studies and neuropsychology.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Credits
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Author Biography
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Neuroaesthetics and Cognitive Poetics: Mapping Baudelairean Modernity in Neural Processing of Word and Image
• 2 Mirroring Haussmannization in Baudelairean Word and Graphic Image
• 3 On Baudelairean Modernity: Neuroaesthetic Modeling of Ironic Self-Reflection
• 4 Mirroring Haussmannization in Baudelairean Word and Photographic Image
• 5 A Collaborative Investigation into Affective and Embodied Aesthetic Responses to Charles Marville’s Old Paris and New Paris Series
• 6 Manet’s Erotic and Ironic Gaze: Photography, Pornography, and Censorship
• 7 Brain Mapping Censorship and Desire in Second Empire Paris
• 8 Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: A Paradigm for Ironic Parody
• 9 Verbal and Visual Parody: Zola’s and Manet’s Ironic Encounters
• 10 Reflections on Baudelairean Modernity
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index