[3] Freedberg’s first degree was in Classics, but he switched to art history while at Oxford as the result of the influence of E.H. Gombrich and Michael Baxandall with whom he studied at the Warburg Institute in London.
While much of his work in this area has been published in articles and catalogues, his chief publication in this field is The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (2002).
The initial aim was to bring humanists and neuroscientists together to assess the possibilities for the humanities and social sciences of new understandings of the neural substrate of responses to art and to images.
This was followed by a series of bi-annual conferences on neuroscientific issues of topical interest (for example those on Vision, Attention, and Emotion in 2008, Neurotechniques in 2010, Music and Neuroscience in 2011, and the Default Mode Network in 2014).
In encouraging such work, he has set out to minimize skepticism and allay fears that the practices and procedures of contemporary neurobiological investigations threaten the contextual approaches of the humanities and social sciences.
The overall aim of the programs at the Italian Academy has been to foster the mutual understanding of new techniques and leading paradigms in the sciences and the humanities, and to achieve new epistemological frameworks for the disciplines.
As Freedberg and Gallese explain, as the eye sees a work of art, the brain mimics gestures mentally, before it cognitively recognizes the conceptual context or effect of the action it’s mimicking.