How artists experience their own art.
Overview
- Department of Psychology and Milan Center for Neuroscience (NeuroMi), University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
- IRCCS Istituto Ortopedico Galeazzi, Milan, Italy
- Centro Internazionale di Brera, Milan, Italy
- School of Medicine and Surgery, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
- IRCCS San Gerardo dei Tintori Foundation, Monza, Italy
- Department of Dynamic, Clinical Psychology and Health, Faculty of Medicine and Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
- IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, Italy
- Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy
- Cognitive Neuropsychology Centre, ASST Grande Ospedale Metropolitano Niguarda, Milan, Italy
- NeuroMi, Milan Center for Neuroscience, Milan, Italy
- Department of Psychology, Faculty of Medicine and Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Abstract
Humanity has always admired and created art, but the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying artistic experience remain elusive. Professional artists and their intimate relationship with their artworks provide a unique opportunity to study the nature of the art experience, given their expertise in both art-making and art appreciation. During two fMRI tasks, professional artists (N = 20) made aesthetic judgments on their own and other artists’ paintings (aesthetic judgment task); they also mentally reconstructed the moments when they conceived their artworks or, as a control condition, when they visited for the first time now-familiar places (reconstruction by imagery task). During aesthetic judgments of their own (as compared to other artists’) paintings, participants showed stronger recruitment of bilateral posterior parietal cortices, the left lateral occipitotemporal cortex, and the dorso-central sector of the right insula, that is, action-related brain regions also involved in encoding the emotional components of movements. The reconstruction of their own artistic creation (compared with episodic memory retrieval connected with places) involved the left fronto-parietal network associated with motor cognition, providing evidence that the sensorimotor dimension may be intrinsically entailed in the creative process. Moreover, the aesthetic judgments attributed to one’s own artworks positively covaried with activity in the right dorsal premotor cortex during creative reconstruction, suggesting that aesthetic value may be linked to the reactivation of sensorimotor components associated with the creative gesture. Altogether, these results hint that the mental representations of the actions involved in creating art are integral to the overall artistic experience of painters, from conception to appreciation, supporting an embodied view of the artists’ experience of art.
Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.
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Data
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Data Availability
All behavioral and neuroimaging data have been deposited in the Open Science Framework (OSF) and are publicly accessible at the following link: https://
Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.
Versions
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Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record
Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 9 authors, 12 MeSH terms, 63 references.
Cite
This paper
Tomasetig, G., Sacheli, L. M., Musco, M. A., Pizzi, S., Basso, G., Spitoni, G. F., Bottini, G., Pizzamiglio, L., & Paulesu, E. (2026). How artists experience their own art. PloS one, 21(8), e0355737. https://
BibTeX
@article{tomasetig2026ho
author = {Tomasetig, Giulia and Sacheli, Lucia Maria and Musco, Margherita Adelaide and Pizzi, Stefano and Basso, Gianpaolo and Spitoni, Grazia Fernanda and Bottini, Gabriella and Pizzamiglio, Luigi and Paulesu, Eraldo},
title = {{How artists experience their own art}},
journal = {PloS one},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
volume = {21},
number = {8},
pages = {e0355737},
publisher = {PLOS},
issn = {1932-6203},
doi = {10.1371/
url = {https://
pmid = {42616727},
pmcid = {PMC13489410}
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
AU - Tomasetig, Giulia
AU - Sacheli, Lucia Maria
AU - Musco, Margherita Adelaide
AU - Pizzi, Stefano
AU - Basso, Gianpaolo
AU - Spitoni, Grazia Fernanda
AU - Bottini, Gabriella
AU - Pizzamiglio, Luigi
AU - Paulesu, Eraldo
TI - How artists experience their own art
T2 - PloS one
J2 - PLoS One
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/
VL - 21
IS - 8
SP - e0355737
SN - 1932-6203
PB - PLOS
DO - 10.1371/
UR - https://
LA - en
ER -
CSL-JSON
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