Abstract

The Psychology of Art has been a topic of discussion in the «Giornale Italiano di Psicologia» between the 1980s and 1990s. After a long absence, the time is ripe for a featured article that provides an updated on the topic, dealing with the debated and sometimes controversial relationship between psychology and art, specifically visual arts and their relationship with the user. Taking inspiration from a model of the aesthetic experience related to the so-called «aesthetic triad» – perception/cognition, pleasure/emotions and context/culture – I present a more-up-to-date definition than the discipline known as the Psychology of Art. The new perspective, called Empirical Aesthetics, profits from current theoretical contributions, research methods, and empirical data of cognitive science, and allows for a more comprehensive account of people’s fruition of art as well as of art’s internal machinery.