Learn the science
Build a coherent foundation in beauty, colour, form, movement, ambiguity, emotion and embodiment.
One central question
How do human beings perceive, understand and experience art?
Neuroaesthetics in Europe brings scientific ideas into direct contact with artworks. Study perception in the classroom, test it through close observation in Paris museums, and return to the works with a transformed way of seeing.
The experience
More than an art tour
This is not a conventional museum visit, nor a series of isolated lectures. It is a continuous exchange between scientific understanding and direct visual experience.
Face the artwork
Move beyond reproductions as scale, material, space and bodily presence become part of the encounter.
See again
Test ideas in real time and return to the museum with sharper questions rather than predetermined answers.
Grand Gallery of the Louvre · Photograph by Nathan Cima / Unsplash
Two formative voices in the field
Faculty
University College London
Professor Semir Zeki
One of the founding figures of neuroaesthetics. His research transformed our understanding of how the visual brain processes colour, form and motion, and established beauty and artistic experience as subjects of neuroscientific investigation.
Columbia University
Professor David Freedberg
An internationally influential scholar across art history, image theory and neuroaesthetics. His work examines how images provoke emotion, motor simulation, bodily sensation and empathic response.
Three connected stages
Eleven sessions move from a shared foundation to intensive Paris study and reflective seminars.
- 1
14 August 2026 · Online
Orientation
Establish a shared vocabulary and examine the promises and limits of neuroaesthetics.
- 2
15–18 August 2026 · Paris
Paris Intensive
Eight in-person sessions: morning lectures and discussion followed by museum study.
- 3
21 August + late August · Online
Seminars
Connect the museum encounters to Renaissance and Baroque studies of embodiment and empathy.
Eleven academic sessions
The curriculum
Designed as a coherent intellectual journey. No prior neuroscience background is required.
Semir Zeki
The Foundations of Neuroaesthetics
01Art, Beauty and the Acquisition of Knowledge
The foundations of neuroaesthetics; art as a means of acquiring knowledge; biological and artefactual beauty; abstraction and the formation of concepts.
02The Brain’s Experience of Beauty
The neural mechanisms engaged by visual, musical, moral, mathematical, sorrowful and joyful beauty, including similarities in responses across cultures.
03Colour as a Construction of the Brain
The Mondrian experiments, Fauvist painting and the brain’s stabilisation of the visual world, with examples from Vermeer, Goya and Velázquez.
04The Brain as a Knowledge-Acquiring System
The brain as a massively parallel and asynchronous system; the relationship between knowledge, conscious experience and representation.
05The Neurobiology of Kinetic Art
How the brain perceives movement in art, from early expressions of motion to Duchamp, Calder, Tinguely and others.
06How the Brain Constructs Form
The construction of form and form constancy through the work of Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Ellsworth Kelly and others.
07Situational Constancy in Art
How the brain recognises and interprets situations across changing visual conditions, considered through Ribera, Vermeer and Goya.
08Ambiguity in Art and the Brain
Why ambiguity is central to both artistic experience and brain function, with special reference to Michelangelo, Cézanne and Vermeer.
David Freedberg
Images, Bodies and the Limits of Neuroaesthetics
09What Can Neuroscience Add to Art?
An introductory seminar on the aims, methods and limits of neuroaesthetics. It considers how the field can move from speculation towards empirical study of human response.
10Renaissance Art: Movement, Emotion and Embodied Response
Botticelli and Michelangelo in dialogue with the neuroscience of movement, emotion, bodily response and the limits of experimental tools.
11Baroque Art: Sensation, Pain and Empathy
Caravaggio and Bernini through movement, touch, pain, sensory systems and the distinction between empathy and sympathy.
Paris as a living laboratory
Artworks are not illustrations of the course. They are part of its evidence.
The programme’s in-person teaching takes place in Paris. Each museum encounter turns colour, form, movement, ambiguity and embodiment into questions that can be observed directly.
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
Mondrian, Francis Bacon, Matisse and the Fauves: colour, form and the construction of visual experience.
Musée Picasso Paris
Different stages of Picasso’s development and the ways the brain constructs and recognises form.
Musée du Louvre
Michelangelo and Titian through the body, ambiguity, material presence and embodied response.
Musée d’Orsay
The transformations of colour, perception and representation that shaped modern visual experience.
Who is this for?
You do not need to arrive with answers. Bring your questions and a willingness to look closely.
- Artists, designers and architects
- Writers and creative practitioners
- Art historians, curators and cultural professionals
- Psychologists, counsellors and educators
- Students and researchers in medicine and neuroscience
- Anyone seeking a new way to understand art and human experience
Everything you need to plan
Practical information
- On-site dates
- 15–18 August 2026
- Online dates
- 14 August, 21 August and one final session in late August
- Venue
- Novotel Paris Porte de Versailles
- Language
- English
- Academic format
- 11 sessions · 3 online · 8 in Paris
- Group size
- Maximum 18 participants
- Application deadline
- 13 August 2026 · Paris time
- Course fee
- £1,550
The fee covers tuition only. Meals, museum admission, accommodation and transport are not included.
Applications close 13 August 2026 · Paris time
Enter the museum with a new set of questions.
What does the brain make visible? Why do images move us before we understand them? Join an intensive encounter with art, perception and the human mind.
Apply and pay securely